Change each character in string to the next character in alphabet

Question

I am coding in Python 2.7 using PyCharm on Ubuntu.

I am trying to create a function that will take a string and change each character to the character that would be

Answer 1

Two main things. 1) Don't use the Python built-in str to define variables as it could lead to unusual behaviour. 2) for letter in range(len(str)) does not return a letter at all (hence the error stating that 0 is not in your list). Instead, it returns numbers one by one up to the length of str. Instead, you can just use for letter in my_string.

EDIT: Note that you don't need to convert the string into a list of letters. Python will automatically break the string into individual letters in for letter in strng. Updated answer based on comment from linus.

def LetterChanges(strng):
    ab_st = list(string.lowercase)
    output_string = []
    for letter in strng:
        if letter == 'z':
            output_string.append('a')
        else:
            letter_index = ab_st.index(letter) + 1
            output_string.append(ab_st[letter_index])
        new_word = "".join(output_string)

    return new_word


# keep this function call here
print LetterChanges(raw_input())