Python program to check matching of simple parentheses

I came across this exercise of checking whether or not the simple brackets “(“, “)” in a given string are matched evenly.

I have seen examples here using the stack command which I haven’t encountered yet. So I attempted a different approach. Can anyone tell me where I am going wrong?

def matched(str):
    ope = []
    clo = []
    for i in range(0,len(str)):
        l = str[i]
        if l == "(":
            ope = ope + ["("]
        else:
            if l == ")":
                clo = clo  + [")"]
            else:
                return(ope, clo)
    if len(ope)==len(clo):
        return True
    else:
        return False

The idea is to pile up “(” and “)” into two separate lists and then compare the length of the lists. I also had another version where I had appended the lists ope and clo with the relevant I which held either ( or ) respectively.

Answer

A very slightly more elegant way to do this is below. It cleans up the for loop and replaces the lists with a simple counter variable. It also returns false if the counter drops below zero so that matched(")(") will return False.

def matched(str):
    count = 0
    for i in str:
        if i == "(":
            count += 1
        elif i == ")":
            count -= 1
        if count < 0:
            return False
    return count == 0