In Python word search, searching diagonally, printing result of where word starts and ends

Question

I have a friend of mine tutoring me in learning Python and he gave me this project where a user will read a word search into the program and the file includes a list of words that will be in the word search. I have to search for these words and some of the words run diagonally. If I find the word, I must print in what row and what column (the coordinates) the word starts and the word ends. I've only been learning Python 2 weeks so I'm confused, how would I search for a word diagonally and get the starting point and ending point of a word? The sample word search is down below and the words to search are with it. I have worked through it and spent 3 days on it and nothing has come of it.

Word Search

HGAMONIHRA
AOMOKAWONS
NFROLBOBDN
ARFSIHCAGE
LNIEEWONOK
GOLFUNDTHC
KOCATAOHBI
AMRERCGANH
SLGFAMALLC
ALLIGATORX

Words to search

CAT
DOG
ALLIGATOR
CHICKEN
FROG

Answer 1

This is more of a brute force problem, however there are more efficient techniques available but keeping in mind that you are new to this field I won't suggest you to focus on algorithmic part, So first of all we will create a function called search_diagonal which will take 3 arguments as starting_point, mesh, length_of_word and you can do some pretty stuff inside that function depending upon the arguments passed.

One you have 3 arguments you can then easily propagate diagonally as:

MESH = ["HGAMONIHRA", "AOMOKAWONS", "NFROLBOBDN", "ARFSIHCAGE", 
"LNIEEWONOK", "GOLFUNDTHC", "KOCATAOHBI", "AMRERCGANH", "SLGFAMALLC", 
"ALLIGATORX"]

def search_diagonal(starting_point, MESH, length_of_word):
    new_word1 = ""
    new_word2 = ""
    new_word3 = ""
    new_word4 = ""
    for i in xrange(length_of_word):
        #Propagating in SE direction
        new_word1+=MESH[starting_point[0]+i][starting_point[1]+i]
    for i in xrange(length_of_word):
        #Propagating in NE direction
        new_word2+=MESH[starting_point[0]+i][starting_point[1]-i]
    for i in xrange(length_of_word):
        #Propagating in NW direction
        new_word3+=MESH[starting_point[0]-i][starting_point[1]-i]
    for i in xrange(length_of_word):
        #Propagating in SW direction
        new_word4+=MESH[starting_point[0]-i][starting_point[1]+i]
    return new_word1, new_word2, new_word3, new_word4

However there is a need to handle a lot of exception cases like index out of range etc. but this must give you a rough idea of how this problem can be solved.