How do I fix the extra word coming in the end?

I am writing a code for adding strings alternatively. It is like this:
If we have 2 strings:

a = "abcd"
b = "efgh"

When we add them the solution should be "aebfcgdh". If there is any extra part of string in any variable it should be added in the end. Now moving onto my code. Here it is:

words1 = "rmiiab"
words2 = "eanna"
if len(words1) > len(words2):
    maxLength = len(words1)
elif len(words1) == len(words2):
    maxLength = len(words1)
else:
    maxLength = len(words2)
result = []
extras = []
for i in range(0, maxLength):
    try:
        result.append(words1[i])
        result.append(words2[i])
    except IndexError:
        remainingWords = maxLength - i
        if len(words1) > len(words2):
            extras.append(words1[-remainingWords])
        else:
            extras.append(words2[-remainingWords])
for word in extras:
    result.append(word)
for letter in result:
    print(letter, end="")

It is working completely fine but for one test case that is when the length of first string is greater than the length of string 2. In that case my code adds the last letter of extra words twice. I am unable to find the error. May someone help me. For the below code the output is:
remaininaabb when it should be remaininaab instead.

This is happening because you are indexing words1 first and words2 second in the same try statement. In this case the assignment is being completed correctly, but then failing on the second append statement and appending the last letter of the first array again. You can fix this by creating separate try statements for each append or calculating an exact number of iterations for each beforehand and avoiding the whole try/catch idea.

Hope this helps!

The code after except in executed multiple times if your strings are uneven, because it doesn't break for loop.

try:
    result.append(words1[i])
    result.append(words2[i])

In this part the first append does not cause IndexError, therefore is executed and the letter is added even if the second append throws IndexError.

You should add break somewhere in except clause to stop looping.

zip the two words, find the length of the shortest word and add anything longer to the collector.

words1 = "rmiiab"
words2 = "eanna"

collector = ""
for a, b in zip(words1, words2): collector += a + b
min_len = min(map(len, (words1, words2)))
collector += words1[min_len:] + words2[min_len:]

print(collector) #remaininaab

The standard library way of doing this uses itertools.zip_longest which works like the built-in zip but allows for iterables of varying sizes:

from itertools import zip_longest, chain

words1 = "rmiiab"
words2 = "eanna"

"".join(chain(*zip_longest(words1, words2, fillvalue="")))
# 'remaininaab'

fillvalue is used to pad the shorter iterables.

Docs:

• zip_longest
• chain