Keeping track of things with dictionaries

[Frank Millman]

"Chris Angelico" <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:CAPTjJmpPAqmb6No7UDdDAdqG_jv9yz0sN4d70KAsksbwWR3jdg at mail.gmail.com...
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:28 PM, Frank Millman <frank at chagford.com> wrote:
>> Are you saying that
>>
>>     all([len(word) == 23 for word in words_by_length[23]])  # hope I got
>> that right
>>
>> will not return True?
>
> That'll return true. What it won't show, though, is the length of the
> word as you would understand it in the English language. You see, when
> you iterate over a file, you get strings that include a newline at the
> end, and that'll be included in the length :) So with a dictionary of
> English words, you'll see that "cat\n" is a four-letter word, and
> "python\n" is a seven-letter word. It's a subtle point, but an
> important one when you start looking at lengths of things that are
> suddenly off by one.
>
> Obviously the solution is to strip them, but I didn't want to pollute
> the example with that (nor a 'with' block). I didn't think it
> particularly important, and just acknowledged the bug in what I
> thought was a throw-away line :)
>

Got it - thanks

Frank