Replace four letter word in python

Question

I am trying to write a program that opens a text document and replaces all four letter words with **. I have been messing around with this program for multiple hour

Answer 1

for element in file:
    words = element.split()
    for word in words:
        if len(word) == 4:
            etc etc

Here's why:

say the first line in your file is 'hello, my name is john' then for the first iteration of the loop: element = 'hello, my name is john' and words = ['hello,','my','name','is','john']

You need to check what is inside each word thus for word in words

Also it might be worth noting that in your current method you do not pay any attention to punctuation. Note the first word in words above...

To get rid of punctuation rather say:

import string

blah blah blah ...
for word in words:
    cleaned_word = word.strip(string.punctuation)
    if len(cleaned_word) == 4:
       etc etc