Hello, and welcome! Are you ready to take your string manipulation skills in Python to the next level? Today, we'll explore a task that not only enhances your understanding of strings but also trains your ability to think creatively. The task at hand involves splitting a string into words, then reversing each word as if reflected in a mirror. Intrigued? Let's dive right in!

Consider a string filled with words. Your task is to write a Python function that accepts such a string. It then takes each of those words, reverses their character order, and, finally, stitches them all together to form a new string with reversed words.

Here's what you need to keep in mind:

• The input string will contain between 1 and 100 words.
• Each word is a sequence of characters separated by white space.
• A word is composed of characters ranging from a to z, A to Z, 0 to 9, or even an underscore _.
• The given string will not start or end with a space - double spaces will not appear either.
• After reversing the words, your program should return a single string with the words preserving their original order.

Example

Suppose that the input string is "Hello neat pythonistas_123".

The function will work on this in the following fashion:

• 'Hello' becomes 'olleH'
• 'neat' becomes 'taen'
• 'pythonistas_123' becomes '321_satsinohtyp'

The function now combines the obtained strings into one string, resulting in "olleH taen 321_satsinohtyp".

Therefore, if solution("Hello neat pythonistas_123") is called, the returned value should be "olleH taen 321_satsinohtyp".

Let's start breaking this down!

Our very first step requires us to separate the words in the sentence. Python provides us with a built-in split() function, which breaks a given string at a specified separator and outputs a list of words. If no argument is provided to the split() function, it defaults to using space as the separator. Here is a sample code to illustrate this:

Python
Copy
1# an initial example string
2input_str = "Hello neat pythonistas_123"
3
4# split the string into words
5words = input_str.split()
6
7print(words)

You will see ['Hello', 'neat', 'pythonistas_123'] printed out.

We've successfully extracted the words from the sentence, but they're not reversed yet. Python's reversed() function comes to the rescue here. However, it returns something called an iterable and not a string directly. To convert this back to a string format, you can use the join() function. Let's add these lines to our existing code:

Python
Copy
1# an example string
2input_str = "Hello neat pythonistas_123"
3
4# split the string into words
5words = input_str.split()
6
7# reverse each word 
8reversed_words = [''.join(reversed(word)) for word in words]
9
10print(reversed_words)

Aha! Now you can see the reversed words: ['olleH', 'taen', '321_satsinohtyp'].

Finally, we need to bring these reversed words back together again into a string format, using space as a separator. We get to use join() again for this. We call join() on the string ' ', which acts as a spacer between the words. Resultantly, our words are not squashed together when we form them into one string. Here's the code to complete our task:

Python
Copy
1def solution(input_str):
2    # split the string into words
3    words = input_str.split()
4    
5    # reverse each word 
6    reversed_words = [''.join(reversed(word)) for word in words]
7    
8    # join the words back together with space as a separator
9    result = ' '.join(reversed_words)
10    
11    return result
12
13# Now we call the function and print the returned result outside of the function
14print(solution("Hello neat pythonistas_123"))  # this will print: 'olleH taen 321_satsinohtyp'

Well done! By completing this lesson, you've gained proficiency in manipulating strings in Python, especially when it comes to reversing the order of characters in a word. I hope you're feeling more confident and enthusiastic about your Python skills. Remember, the key to mastery is regular practice. Therefore, take a moment to explore related problems and practice what you’ve learned. It's all part of the joy of learning!