Basic python string [closed]

Question

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, visit the help center.

Closed 7 years ago.

We just started working with string in my CSCI class, but I'm confused with a recent assignment.

You are given a long string:

"""Justin$Calculus$90$Java$85$Python88$
Taylor$Calculus$73$Java$95$Python86$
Drew$Calculus$80$Java$75$Python94$
"""

The string has three lines. It contains three students’ scores of three courses. Write a function findScore(student, subject). When you call the function such as findScore(‘Drew’,’Java’), the function prints “Drew got 75 of the course Java.”

In addition to the function findScore(student, subject), you can write other functions. All the functions are inside one program.

I would assume that I need to assign this string to a variable, but do I use one variable, or one for each line?

Any ideas of a start would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to python so bear with me. Also, what is the significance of the $ signs?

Answer 1

have a look at str.split. You can use it to split a string up into a list:

"foo bar baz".split()     #['foo','bar','baz'] (split on any whitespace)
"foo$bar$baz".split('$')  #['foo','bar','baz']

From here, it's just a matter of splitting the string into the appropriate lists, and then iterating over the lists properly to pick out the elements that you need.

Additionally, you could use str.find to get the index of the class name and split your string there using slicing before splitting on $. That would make it easier to get the particular score (without an additional iteration):

s = 'foo$bar$baz'
s_new = s[s.find('bar'):]  #'bar$baz'
baz = s_new.split('$')[1]
print baz

Answer 2

store string in a variable, say:

strs="""Justin$Calculus$90$Java$85$Python88$
Taylor$Calculus$73$Java$95$Python86$
Drew$Calculus$80$Java$75$Python94$
"""

loop over strs.split() using a for loop , i.e for line in strs.split() (using strs.split() will return a list containing all lines, splitted at whitespace)

now for each line use line.rstrip("$").split('$'), it'll return something like this for the first line:

['Justin', 'Calculus', '90', 'Java', '85', 'Python88']

rstrip("$") will remove the rightmost $ from the line

Answer 3

A convenient way to read this would be to use the csv module. It's intended for Comma Separated Values, but you can change the delimiter and use $ instead.

You would need to use delimiter='$' as an argument to your reader.