Hi Don, welcome aboard!
> > day1 = input('Enter total hours on duty day1 ?')
> > day2 = input('Enter total hours on duty day2 ?')
> > day3 = input('Enter total hours on duty day3 ?')
[some code cut...]
> Clearly, asking for inputs like this is a bit tedious. You had a great
> idea with the historyList, so let's use it like so:
>
> historyList = []
> for i in range(8):
> querry_string = "Enter total hours on duty on day%d" %(i+1)
> input = raw_input(querry_string)
> historyList.append(input)
Pijus shows that Python lists are expandable --- we can append() elements
to an empty list, and Python will automagically expand the size of them
for us. There's some reference material on Python lists here:
http://www.python.org/doc/lib/typesseq-mutable.html
if we want to see a complete list of what lists can do. Another good
source of information about lists is in the Python tutorial:
http://www.python.org/doc/tut/node5.html#SECTION005140000000000000000
http://www.python.org/doc/tut/node7.html#SECTION007100000000000000000
Lots of good stuff. *grin* Play around with it a bit, and I think you'll
like what you see.
> print "-----------------------------------------------------"
There's an easier way to do this:
###
print '-' * 60
###
We can "multiply" strings with an integer, and it'll duplicate that string
that many times. This is very convenient for building headers. Here's an
example with the interpreter:
###
>>> header = '-=' * 20 + '-'
>>> header
'-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-'
###
For a quick overview of this, we can look at:
http://www.python.org/doc/tut/node5.html#SECTION005120000000000000000
> print "total hours on duty last 7 Days: " , historyList [-1]
> + historyList[-2]+ historyList[-3]+ historyList[-4]
> + historyList[-5]+ historyList[-6]+ historyList[-7]
>
> Again, this is better handled by a little loop:
>
> for i in historyList:
> totalhours = totalhours + i
> print totalhours
It's possible to write helper functions that work with lists:
###
def sum(some_list):
total = 0
for item in some_list:
total = total + item
return total
###
so that, later on, when we add up historyList, it looks like a bulk
action:
###
totalhours = sum(historyList)
###
which I think is pretty nice.
If we just want to add a subset of this list, we can "slice" a portion of
the list off. Here's an example of "slicing" in the Python interpreter:
###
>>> weekdays = ['monday', 'tuesday', 'wednesday', 'thursday', 'friday']
>>> weekdays[0:3]
['monday', 'tuesday', 'wednesday']
>>> weekdays[-3:]
['wednesday', 'thursday', 'friday']
###
Combining these two ideas, getting the total hours of duty for the last
seven days can be short and sweet:
###
print "total hours on duty last 7 Days: ", sum(historyList[-7:])
###
> > # output list of hours from input
> >
> > print historyList [0:100]
>
> If you want to do it like this, just say:
>
> print historyList[:] # this gets you the whole list
Also,
###
print historyList
###
will work if we don't need to slice the list.
If you have questions, please feel free to ask.