Question

I have a string, dictionary in the form:

('(Laughter flower)',
 {'laughter': (8.5, 0.9313),
  'flower': (7.88, 1.1718),
  'the': (4.98, 0.9145),
  'puppy': (7.58, 1.4581),
  'died': (1.56, 1.198),
  'laugh': (9.5, 0.1),
  'flow': (2.3, 0.51)
 }
)

Each parentheses is a tuple which corresponds to (score, standard deviation). I’m taking the average of just the first integer in each tuple. I’ve tried this:

def score(string, d):
    if len(string) == 0:
        return 0
    string = string.lower()
    included = [d[word][0]for word in d if word in string]
    return sum(included) / len(included)

When I run:

print score ('(Laughter flower)', {'laughter': (8.5, 0.9313), 'flower': 
(7.88, 1.1718), 'the':(4.98, 0.9145), 'puppy':(7.58, 1.4581), 
'died':(1.56, 1.198),'laugh': (9.5, 0.1),'flow': (2.3, 0.51)})

I should get the average of only 'laughter' and 'flower': 8.5 + 7.88 / 2 but this running function also includes 'laugh' and 'flow' : 8.5 + 7.88 + 9.5 + 2.3 /4.

Answer 1

@Ignaco is right about why you’re including “flow” and “laugh”…

You could write the code as the following though:

data = ('(Laughter flower)', {'laughter': (8.5, 0.9313), 'flower': (7.88, 1.1718), 
'the':(4.98, 0.9145), 'puppy':(7.58, 1.4581), 'died':(1.56, 1.198), 'laugh': 
(9.5, 0.1),'flow': (2.3, 0.51)})

# Unpack for naming
keys, vals = data
# Assume () and first and last
look_for = keys[1:-1].lower().split()
# Get relevant numbers
nums = [vals[k][0] for k in look_for]
# Print average
print sum(nums) / len(nums)

---

so you generalise the function to just average the first element of relevant keys:

def somefunc(keys, dct):
    vals = [dct[k][0] for k in keys]
    return sum(vals) / float(len(vals))

And you have to pre-process some string somehow, so that it’s a sequence of valid keys:

some_string = '(laughter flower)'
keys = some_string[1:-1].lower().split()
print somefunc(keys, some_dict)