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Python

Posted by Keifer Joedicker
Keifer Joedicker
5,869 Points

How to find how many values are in a key? I keep getting back each character counted as opposed to a whole value.

http://pastebin.com/PEjkJSxb

I'm trying to find how many values are assigned to a key than reassign the number to the key in a new dictionary. I keep getting back the values counted by character instead of counted in whole as one. What am I doing wrong?

Alexander Davison
Alexander Davison
65,469 Points

What do you mean?

Keifer Joedicker
Keifer Joedicker
5,869 Points

Alexander Davidson Say the value was "Hey" I get back 3 as apposed to counting the value as 1

2 Answers

Grant Tribble
Grant Tribble
8,210 Points

Hi Keifer, Man! This was a good one!! So, if you are in control of how you load up your dictionary... Then do it like Ryan suggests and make the values of the keys in lists, tuples or even sets (even if it's just one item). If you're not in control of the input dictionary, you'll need to write in a conditional that will sort those suckers out. If there are multiple values for any given key, they will have to be set in there as a list, tuple, set... and maybe some other cool data type that I'm not thinking of. However, if someone on the input side gets tricky with you and inputs a single string, it will be counted as a string and thus give you the length of that string instead of telling you that there's only one item there. So... if you want to catch that sneaky little guy, you just need to set a trap for a datatype 'str'!!! Remember, if it's not a string, it will be in a datatype that can be counted the way you intended. There are probably much cleaner ways to do this, but i'm going to give you the down and dirty.

    def num_courses(a):
        dishes = {}
        for i in a:
            if type(a[i]) == type("any ole string"):
                dishes[i] = 1
            else:
                dishes[i] = len(a[i])
        return(dishes)

    menu = {"Big Dinner" : ['Appetizer', 'Salad', 'Entre', 'Sides', 'Desert'], "Regular Dinner" : ('Salad', 'Entre', 'Sides') , "Little Dinner" : {'Entre', 'Sides'}, "Snack" : 'Appetizer'}

    num_course(menu)

And that should do it!! Nobody will sneak a silly ole string in on you from there! Good luck!

Keifer Joedicker
Keifer Joedicker
5,869 Points

Thank you that was really helpful!

Ryan S
Ryan S
27,276 Points
Ryan S
Ryan S
27,276 Points

Hi Keifer,

Do you mean that each key will potentially have more than one value and you want to count each value?

If I understand what you are asking then you will need to put each value in its own list, and find the length of that. If you only have a single string as a value then the len() function will count the number of characters. If you have a list of strings, then it will count each string as an item.

So your logic is fine for your function, but you will need to change the way you define the "hey" dictionary.

Try it like this:

hey = {'Name': ['Zara'], 'Age': ['7'], 'Class': ['First'],}

This way you can add however many values you want to each key and it will count them as you intend.

Hope this helps.

Keifer Joedicker
Keifer Joedicker
5,869 Points

Thank you for your time it worked perfectly!