Pyramid of Letters (Difficult Python Practice Question 3)

Day 74 of experimenting with video content

Write a function pyramid(string) that takes in a string, and prints the following pyramid-like pattern.

• assume string has no spaces
• the 1st line has 1 character, the 2nd line has 2, the 3rd line has 3 etc
• if there are insufficient characters, use * to pad your row.

pyramid('abcdef')

a
bc
def

pyramid('abcde')

a
bc
de*

pyramid('abcdefg')

a
bc
def
g***

Do take some time to give this a go before taking a look at the answer.

Getting to the answer

Let’s use the string abcdefg as an example.

a
bc
def
g***

We need to keep track of 1) the row length 2) index of starting character

      row_length   start_character  start_index
a     1            a                0
bc    2            b                1
def   3            d…