Question

I am learning Python and am making a Q&A script. I made one function for the questions. That went rather well. Now I am wanting an average function. I want to avoid using globals if at all possible. I know that my variables reset at the top… can someone please give me some pointers? I know C/PHP/BASIC and want to grasp this langauge. Below is my question function.

    def q(question, a, b, c, c_answer):
        total,tally=0,0
        print "",question
        print "   a.",str(a)
        print "   b.",str(b)
        print "   c.",str(c)
        u_answer = raw_input()
        if c_answer == "a" and u_answer == "a":
            print "Correct, the answer is A!"
            tally+=1
        elif c_answer == "b" and u_answer == "b":
            print "Correct, the answer is B!"
            tally+=1
        elif c_answer == "c" and u_answer == "c":
            print "Correct, the answer is C!"
            tally+=1
        else:
           print "I am sorry, but the correct answer is",c_answer
        print "\..n"
        total+=1

Answer 1

Since you’re just learning Python, I reformatted your code to be more pythonic.

def q(question, a, b, c, c_answer):
    total, tally = 0, 0
    print "", question
    print "   a. %s" % a
    print "   b. %s" % b
    print "   c. %s" % c
    u_answer = raw_input("your answer? ").strip()
    if c_answer == u_answer:
        print "Correct, the answer is %s!" % u_answer
        tally += 1
    else:
        print "I am sorry, but the correct answer is %s" % c_answer
    print "\n"
    total += 1

---

To actually answer your question:

There a couple ways to keep track of the total number of questions and correct answers without using global-level variables (actually module-level, but that’s a different topic ;).

One is to pass in the current totals, have q recalculate based on the current question, and then pass them back out:

def q(question, a, b, c, c_answer, total, tally):
    print "", question
    print "   a. %s" % a
    print "   b. %s" % b
    print "   c. %s" % c
    u_answer = raw_input("your answer? ").strip()
    if c_answer == u_answer:
        print "Correct, the answer is %s!" % u_answer
        tally += 1
    else:
        print "I am sorry, but the correct answer is %s" % c_answer
    print "\n"
    total += 1
    return total, tally

Then in your main program you can say:

question_pool = (
    ('What is 2 + 2?', 2, 3, 4, 'c'),
    ('What is blue mixed with yellow?', 'green', 'orange', 'pink', 'a'),
    ('How far does light travel in one nanosecond?', '10 mm', '20 cm', '30 m', 'b'),
    )

total, tally = 0, 0
for packet in question_pool:
    question, a, b, c, answer = packet
    total, tally = q(question, a, b, c, answer, total, tally)

print "you answered %d correctly, for a score of %2.0f%%" % (tally, 100.0 * tally / total)

---

However, it would be better for q to just deal with questions, and not worry about keeping track of how many questions have been answered and how many questions have been asked.

So instead of accepting total and tally, recalculating, and returning total and tally, q will now just return 0 if the answer was wrong, 1 if it was correct:

def q(question, a, b, c, c_answer):
    print "", question
    print "   a. %s" % a
    print "   b. %s" % b
    print "   c. %s" % c
    u_answer = raw_input("your answer? ").strip()
    if c_answer == u_answer:
        print "Correct, the answer is %s!\n" % u_answer
        return 1
    print "I am sorry, but the correct answer is %s" % c_answer
    return 0

and the rest of the code looks like:

question_pool = (
    ('What is 2 + 2?', 2, 3, 4, 'c'),
    ('What is blue mixed with yellow?', 'green', 'orange', 'pink', 'a'),
    ('How far does light travel in one nanosecond?', '10 mm', '20 cm', '30 m', 'b'),
    )

total, tally = 0, 0
for packet in question_pool:
    question, a, b, c, answer = packet
    tally += q(question, a, b, c, answer)
    total += 1

print "you answered %d correctly, for a score of %.0f%%" % (tally, 100.0 * tally / total)