Question

if report == True:  
    print ("\tActive parts:\t%s")%(len(pact)) # TOTAL P Part and Active
    print ("\tDiscontinued parts:\t%s")%(len(pdisc)) # TOTAL P Part and Discontinued
    print ("\tSlow-moving parts:\t%s")%(len(pslow)) # TOTAL P Part and Slow-moving
    print ("\tObsolete parts:\t%s")%(len(pobs)) # P TOTAL Part and Obsolete

How could I best simplify the above? I have roughly 80 other print statements such as that which are steadily make the code very difficult to work with?

Answer 1

Re-factor your code so that your individual variables are stored in a dictionary, e.g.,

data['pact']  = ...
data['pdisc'] = ...

Or even as attributes of a class,

class Data:
    pact = ...
    pdisc = ...

Then you’d create a separate list of strings to describe each attribute, such as:

longnames = {"pact": "Active parts", "pdisc": "Discontinued parts", ... }

Then you can print them like this:

if report:
    for key, name in values:
        print "\t%s\t%d" % (name, len(data[key])) # if using a dict
        print "\t%s\t%d" % (name, len(getattr(data, key))) # if using a class