That's fair, I appreciate your response. I just searched for a solution and submitted, kind of cheated to get to the solutions here, and I'm now deconstructing all the solutions and learning a ton :)

Can you explain this? I am newer, how does it know that spaceNumber is a space, etc.

If you're new to programming, jumping from 8kyu to a 6kyu problem isn't ok. What you see in "Your Next Challenge" depends on the value below the language, it could be Random, Rank Up, Fundamentals. You could also click on Kata on the left sidebar and select the language and the kyu lvl. It's hard to explain what you need to do here without spoiling it and I'm not sure if what I can suggest would help you without seeing your code.

Python noob here, have read over the instructions a few times and still have no idea where to start with this. Have done a few Coursera courses, tons of Edabit exercises, this showed up as next challenge after a pretty easy one here and I want to tackle it but conceptually I don't understand what the function would actually do? It already replaces dots and dashes and spaces.