2 line Function doesn't work

[Bouzy]

I am trying to go through words in a list of words and take out all the '.'s. I made the function ...

def clearup(tor): 

   tor = tor.replace('.', '')

words = fcheck.read().split()

 for word in words:
      clearup(word)
      if word in dictionary: # dictionary is a tuple of words
         pass
      else:
         print word

why doesn't this work? it prints the words but the periods have not been replaced.

[Smygis]

What happens is that you got a function that modify a copy of a string and then don't do anything with it.

This is one way of how you can do it instead.

def clearup(tor): 
   return tor.replace('.', '')

words = fcheck.read().split()

 for word in words:
      word = clearup(word)
      if word in dictionary: # dictionary is a tuple of words
         pass
      else:
         print word

But wont it be simpler to just put is as:

word.replace('.', '')

[Bouzy]

Thanks, with your help and some other things I did I got it fixed, but the reason I didn't use your second example is because I was going to reuse the function because it's replacing not just ','s but every punctuation mark in the English language.

Problem solved.