[Tutor] need a hint

[Oscar Benjamin]

Reposting to the list. Please send your response to the tutor list
rather than directly to me. That way you'll get a response more
quickly (from someone else). Also can you please write your response
below mine like below (rather than top-posting)?

On 3 December 2013 06:25, Byron Ruffin <byron.ruffin at g.austincc.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 4:51 AM, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On 2 December 2013 02:25, Byron Ruffin <byron.ruffin at g.austincc.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > The following program works and does what I want except for one last
>> > problem
>> > I need to handle.   The program reads a txt file of senators and their
>> > associated states and when I input the last name it gives me their
>> > state.
>> > The problem is "Udall".  There are two of them.  The txt file is read by
>> > line and put into a dictionary with the names split.  I need a process
>> > to
>> > handle duplicate names.  Preferably one that will always work even if
>> > the
>> > txt file was changed/updated.  I don't want the process to handle the
>> > name
>> > "Udall" specifically.   For a duplicate name I would like to tell the
>> > user
>> > it is not a unique last name and then tell them to enter first name and
>> > then
>> > return the state of that senator.
>>
>> You're currently doing this:
>>
>> >     senateInfo = {}
>> >         senateInfo[lastName] = state
>>
>> Instead of storing just a state in the dict you could store a list of
>> states e.g.:
>>
>>     senateInfo[lastName] = [state]
>>
>> Then when you find a lastName that is already in the dict you can do:
>>
>>     senateInfo[lastName].append(state)
>>
>> to append the new state to the existing list of states. You'll need a
>> way to test if a particular lastName is already in the dict e.g.:
>>
>>     if lastName in senateInfo:
>
> I tried this but I don't understand how to use it. I'm a beginner.  I
> understand that the brackets puts the states into a list but I don't know
> what to do with that.  I am able to detect if a name appears more than once
> using an "if" but that code runs as many times as the name occurs.

Could you perhaps show the code that you currently have? I don't quite
understand what you mean.

Note that I deliberately didn't give you an exact answer to your
problem because it looks like homework.


Oscar