Error while inserting one string in another

Question

I have a string s= 'aaeekmnnry' and another string p = 'aka'. I want to insert p at the 2nd index at s so that my output is ans = 'aaakaeekmnrry'. To achieve this, I wrote the following piece of code:

f = p[0]
i = 0
while i < len(s):
    if p[0] <= s[i]:
        i+=1
    else:
        break    
ans = ''.join(s[:i]) + ''.join(p) + ''.join(s[i:])

But my index i becomes length of the string and ouput is 'aaeekmnnryaka', I was expecting i to become 2. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You are getting your conditions wrong. You should break out when you see the letter in s is lexicographically higher.

i = 0
while i < len(s):
    if p[0] < s[i]:
        break
    else:
        i += 1

ans = s[:i] + p + s[i:]
# aaakaeekmnnry