Question

I am new to python! Done my studying, gone through several books and now attempting pyschools challenges. Done Variables and data types successfully but Question 7 of Topic 2 (Functions) is giving me hell.

I am using Eclipse with Python (ver 3.2). in my eclipse, I get the answers 100, 51 and 525. Those are the same answers pyschools expects but it shows that my function returns 100, 0 and 500.

Here is the question (Hope am allowed to post it here!):
Write a function percent(value, total) that takes in two numbers as arguments, and returns the percentage value as an integer.
And below is my function

    def percent (value, total):
        a = value
        b = total
        return(int((a / b) * 100))
    percent(70, 70)
    percent(46, 90)
    percent(63, 12)

Can anyone tell me what pyschools really want me to do or where am going wrong?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You’re using Python 3.x and they’re using Python 2.x. In Python 2.x, the / operation is always an integer division when the arguments are integers. 1/2 is 0. So, use float() to change one of your arguments to a floating-point number, such as int((float(a) / b) * 100). Then a/b will have a fractional part.

Or, assuming they are using a recent version of Python 2.x, you can just add this to the beginning of your script and it should work on the site:

from __future__ import division

As an aside, why are you assigning your input parameters to variables? They’re already variables. If you want them named a and b, just receive them that way:

def percent(a, b):
    return int((float(a) / b) * 100)