[Tutor] Best Practice: Subroutines and Loop logic

[Benno Lang]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:29 AM, GoodPotatoes<goodpotatoes at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to find the best way to do this.  My goal is to only call this
> subroutine only ONCE, and the logic is contingent upon two outputs.
>
> lWords=[...] # List of many, many words
> lData=[...] #list of some words that need to be validated against lWords
>
> #subroutine to search for words, ignore case
> def sub1(foo):
>     pFoo=re.compile(foo,re.I)
>     for word in lWords:
>         if re.search(pFoo,word):
>             return[1,word]
>
> #logic loop
> for word in lData:
>     if word in lWords:
>         continue
>     elif sub1(word)[0]=1:
>         word=sub1(word)[1]  # <--- Here is my question.
>     else:
>         print word " not found.\n"
>
> The subroutine is being run once at the elif statement.  I don't want to run
> it again just to get the [1] value.
>     *Is there any way to capture all of the values returned when it is run
> during the elif statement?

Yes. BTW, since you have a continue, I don't think you need the elif.

>     *Is this actually running twice?

Yes, but it needn't.
I think you would do something like this instead:

if word in lWords:
    continue
result = sub1(word):
if result[0] == 1:
    word = result[1]
else:
    print word " not found.\n"

My apologies if this doesn't make any sense. I'm very much a beginner in Python.

HTH,
benno.