Lingo Guess Game

I'm writing a program for a game called "Lingo":

def lingo():                
            guesslst = []
            word = list("tiger")          

            while guesslst != word:
                new = []
                guess = raw_input("Enter word: ")
                guesslst = list(guess)
                for x in guesslst:
                    if x in word:
                        for y in word:
                            if x == y:
                                if word.index(y) == guesslst.index(x):
                                    if x not in new:
                                        new.append("[%s]" %x)
                                else:
                                    if x not in new:
                                        new.append("(%s)" %x)
                    else:
                        if x not in new:
                            new.append(x)
                print("".join(new))            
            print("Congradulations you win! The word was %s" %"".join(word))

def main():            
             print("Loading word list from file...")
             print("Welcome to the game, Lingo!")
             lingo()           

if __name__ == "__main__": main()

This is how it should work:

Welcome to the game, Lingo!
Enter word: snake
snak(e)
Enter word: fiest
fis(t)
Enter word: times
[t][i]m[e]s
Enter word: tiger
[t][i][g][e][r]
Congradulations you win! The word was tiger


How can I improve this code?

Various details

The first things caught by my eye are : an akward indentation, a typo in "Congratulations" and the inlined call to main.

Then, in the slightly less visible details, you are missing a whitespace after the operator %.

Finally, in the invisible details, you have trailing whitespaces.

After getting this fixed, you have :

def lingo():
    guesslst = []
    word = list("tiger")

    while guesslst != word:
        new = []
        guess = raw_input("Enter word: ")
        guesslst = list(guess)
        for x in guesslst:
            if x in word:
                for y in word:
                    if x == y:
                        if word.index(y) == guesslst.index(x):
                            if x not in new:
                                new.append("[%s]" % x)
                        else:
                            if x not in new:
                                new.append("(%s)" % x)
            else:
                if x not in new:
                    new.append(x)
        print("".join(new))
    print("Congratulations you win! The word was %s" % "".join(word))

def main():
    print("Loading word list from file...")
    print("Welcome to the game, Lingo!")
    lingo()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Subtle bug

At the moment, when the initial word contains a duplicated letter ("tigert" for instance), you code does not quite work.

A matter of preference

This is purely personal but I do not quite like having to initialise guesslst to an empty list only to make the test for the first iteration go fine. I'd rather write something like :

while True:
    guesslst = ...
    ...
    if guesslst == word:
        break

Types

You do not need to convert your original word into a list : for and in will work just as well on a string. Similarly, you do not need to convert the guesses into a list. This makes a lot of code removable :

def lingo():
    word = 'tiger'

    #while True:
    #    guess = raw_input("Enter word: ")
    for guess in ['tige', 'monkey', 'a', 'i', 'tigre', 'tiger', 'tigert', 'foo']:
        new = []
        for x in guess:
            if x in word:
                for y in word:
                    if x == y:
                        if word.index(y) == guess.index(x):
                            if x not in new:
                                new.append("[%s]" % x)
                        else:
                            if x not in new:
                                new.append("(%s)" % x)
            else:
                if x not in new:
                    new.append(x)
        print("".join(new))
        if guess == word:
            print("Congratulations you win! The word was %s" % word)
            break

Code organisation

It can easily be seen than nothing will happen for a given x if it is already in new. We might as well extract the corresponding logic in a single place :

for x in guess:
        if x not in new:
            if x in word:
                for y in word:
                    if x == y:
                        if word.index(y) == guess.index(x):
                            new.append("[%s]" % x)
                        else:
                            new.append("(%s)" % x)
                        break
            else:
                new.append(x)

StackExchange Code Review Q#64206, answer score: 2