If you get stuck, there are number of things to try.
And if you can only do part of a problem - turn that in.
The point of all this is to stretch your mind, not to get the right answers.
Here are a few specific useful tricks for this week's problems.
>>> "one two three".split() # break a string into words
['one', 'two', 'three']
>>> [' '] * 200 # make a long empty list of spaces
>>> file.readlines() # read in lines from a file
>>> chr(ord('a') + 2) # two characters past 'a'
The accumulator pattern can be used to count things in a file.
Good luck!