I am trying to make a python that can remove any occurences of any word in stopwords from the wordlist, but I don't know what is exactly wrong with this program. Any suggestions?

STOPWORDS = ['a','able','about','across','after','all','almost','also','am','among',
             'an','and','any','are','as','at','be','because','been','but','by','can',
             'cannot','could','dear','did','do','does','either','else','ever','every',
             'for','from','get','got','had','has','have','he','her','hers','him','his',
             'how','however','i','if','in','into','is','it','its','just','least','let',
             'like','likely','may','me','might','most','must','my','neither','no','nor',
           'not','of','off','often','on','only','or','other','our','own','rather','said',
             'say','says','she','should','since','so','some','than','that','the','their',
             'them','then','there','these','they','this','tis','to','too','twas','us',
             'wants','was','we','were','what','when','where','which','while','who',
             'whom','why','will','with','would','yet','you','your']

def remove_stop_words(wordlist, stopwords=STOPWORDS):
    wordlist = raw_input("type a sentence: ")
    marked = []
    for t in wordlist:
        if t.lower() in stopwords:
            marked.append('*')
        else:
            marked.append(t)

remove_stop_words('')

You do not split user input to words, you should be building the new sentence without stop words, marked does not make sense.

You might want to do it this way:

STOPWORDS = ['a','able','about','across','after','all','almost','also','am','among',
             'an','and','any','are','as','at','be','because','been','but','by','can',
             'cannot','could','dear','did','do','does','either','else','ever','every',
             'for','from','get','got','had','has','have','he','her','hers','him','his',
             'how','however','i','if','in','into','is','it','its','just','least','let',
             'like','likely','may','me','might','most','must','my','neither','no','nor',
           'not','of','off','often','on','only','or','other','our','own','rather','said',
             'say','says','she','should','since','so','some','than','that','the','their',
             'them','then','there','these','they','this','tis','to','too','twas','us',
             'wants','was','we','were','what','when','where','which','while','who',
             'whom','why','will','with','would','yet','you','your']

def remove_stop_words(wordlist, stopwords=STOPWORDS):
    # ask for sentence if wordlist is empty
    if not wordlist:
        sentence = raw_input("type a sentence: ")
        wordlist = sentence.split()
    marked = []
    for t in wordlist:
        if t.lower() in stopwords:
            marked.append('*')
        else:
            marked.append(t)
    return marked

# test empty list
wordlist = []
marked_list = remove_stop_words(wordlist)
print(marked_list)

# test given list
wordlist = "should you beg or steal".split()
marked_list = remove_stop_words(wordlist)
print(marked_list)

''' example ...
type a sentence: hello there
['hello', '*']
['*', '*', 'beg', '*', 'steal']
'''
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