How to use an elif (or something else) to break out of this function upon a certain condition being met

Question

displayed_word = [" ", " ", " ", " "]
hangman = [":(", "-I", "-<", "you died!"]
guess_count = 0
secret_word = ["t", "e", "s", "t"]
miss_count = [-1]

def congratulations():
    print("congratulations, you solved it")

def hangman_start():
    guess = input("guess your letter:")
    secret_word = ["t", "e", "s", "t"]
    if guess == secret_word[0]:
        displayed_word[0] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[1]:
        displayed_word[1] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[2]:
        displayed_word[2] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[3]:
        displayed_word[3] = guess
    elif displayed_word == secret_word:
        print("congratulations")
    print(displayed_word)
    if guess not in secret_word:
        miss_count[0] += 1
        print(hangman[miss_count[0]])
    hangman_start()

hangman_start()

I have gotten my 'hangman' game to work the way i want it to for now, but the one thing I can't figure out is how to have it exit upon the miss_count hitting "you died!" or upon displayed_word being the same as the secret_word. I can have it print statements at that time, but when I try to add "break" under those lines I get "break outside of loop". Is there a different command to do this?

Answer 1

break is used to exit loops, such as for or while. Here your "loop" is actually recursion, so instead you want to use return which makes the function return a value and stop, in our case we will simply return nothing, so None. This should work:

displayed_word = [" ", " ", " ", " "]
hangman = [":(", "-I", "-<", "you died!"]
guess_count = 0
secret_word = ["t", "e", "s", "t"]
miss_count = [-1]

def congratulations():
    print("congratulations, you solved it")

def hangman_start():
    guess = input("guess your letter:")
    secret_word = ["t", "e", "s", "t"]
    if guess == secret_word[0]:
        displayed_word[0] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[1]:
        displayed_word[1] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[2]:
        displayed_word[2] = guess
    if guess == secret_word[3]:
        displayed_word[3] = guess
    elif displayed_word == secret_word:
        print("congratulations")

        return # exit recursion

    print(displayed_word)
    if guess not in secret_word:
        miss_count[0] += 1
        print(hangman[miss_count[0]])

        if miss_count[0] == len(hangman) -1:
            return # exit recursion

    hangman_start()

hangman_start()