How to set up a for loop to append any word with punctuation with as a key with an empty value in a dictionary

Question

I am trying to use code to develop a Markov chain that will create random sentences from a string. I have already split the string and am evaluating it. My current code is:

#Your code here
string = '''how much wood could a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck
if a woodchuck could chuck wood.'''
st_dict={}

for i in range(0, len(words)-1):
  #print(words)
  word=words[i]
  next_word=words[i+1]
  if word in ['.','?']:
    st_dict[word]=[]
  elif word in st_dict:
    st_dict[word].append(next_word)
  else:
    st_dict[word]=[next_word]
st_dict[words[-1]]=[]
print(st_dict)

However, any word that has punctuation in it should only have a null list as its value. However, I cannot get this to work. I have tried: word not in ['.','?'... etc] in addition to the if statement above, but words with punctuation in the middle of the string still append the next word as a value. How do I prevent this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

word in ['.','?'] will only be true if word is exactly '.' or exactly '?'.

You want the opposite: '.' in word or '?' in word.

If you have a list of punctuation then you should use any:

punctuation = ".?"
any(punct in word for punct in punctuation)