Question

I’m studing Python for one month and I’m trying to make a keygen application by using the dictionary. The idea was to compare each letter in name = input(‘Name: ‘) to dict.keys() and print as result dict.values() for each letter of name equal to dict.keys(). That’s what I wrote:

name = input('Name: ')

kalg = dict()
kalg['a'] = '50075'
kalg['b'] = '18099'
kalg['c'] = '89885'
etc...

I tryed writing this…

for x in kalg.keys():
    print(x)[/code]

…but i need to keep print(x) result but i don’t know how to do it! If i do this:

for x in kalg.keys():
    a = x

‘a’ keeps only the last key of the dictionary :(. I thought it was because print(x) prints each key of dict.keys() on a new line but i don’t know how to solve it (I tryed by converting type etc… but it didn’t work).

Please can you help me solve this? I also don’t know how to compare each letter of a string with another string and print dict.values() as result and in the right position.

Sorry for this stupid question but i’m too excited in writing python apps 🙂

---

@ Karl

I’m studing Python over two differt books: ‘Learning Python’ by Mark Luts which covers Python
2 and a pocket which covers Python 3. I examined the list comprehension ón the pocket one and Imanaged to write three other variants of this keygen. Now i want to ask you how can I implementthe source code of this keygen in a real application with a GUI which verify if name_textbox andkey_textbox captions match (i come from basic so that was what i used to write, just to give youan idea) as the keygen output result. I know i can try to do this by my own (I did but with nosuccess) but I would like to first complete the book (the pocket one) and understand all the mainaspects of Python. Thank you for the patience.

Answer 1

Calling print can’t “keep” anything (since there is no variable to store it in), and repeatedly assigning to a variable replaces the previous assignments. (I don’t understand your reasoning about the problem; how print(x) behaves has nothing to do with how a = x behaves, as they’re completely different things to be doing.)

Your question boils down to “how do I keep a bunch of results from several similar operations?” and on a conceptual level, the answer is “put them into a container”. But explicitly putting things into the container is more tedious than is really necessary. You have an English description of the data you want: “dict.values() for each letter of name equal to dict.keys()”. And in fact the equivalent Python is shockingly similar.

Of course, we don’t actually want a separate copy of dict.values() for each matching letter; and we don’t actually want to compare the letter to the entire set of dict.keys(). As programmers, we must be more precise: we are checking whether the letter is a key of the dict, i.e. if it is in the set of dict.keys(). Fortunately, that test is trivial to write: for a given letter, we check letter in dict. When the letter is found, we want the corresponding value; we get that by looking it up normally, thus dict[letter].

Then we wrap that all up with our special syntax that gives us what we want: the list comprehension. We put the brackets for a list, and then inside we write (some expression that calculates a result from the input element) for (a variable name for the input elements, so we can use it in that first expression) in (the source of input elements); and we can additionally filter the input elements at the same time, by adding if (some condition upon the input element).

So that’s simple enough: [kalg[letter] for letter in name if letter in kalg]. Notice that I have name as the “source of elements”, because that’s what it should be. You explained that perfectly clearly in your description of the problem – why are you iterating over dict.keys() in your existing for-loops? 🙂

Now, this expression will give us a list of the results, so e.g. [‘foo’, ‘bar’, ‘baz’]. If we want one continuous string (I assume all the values in your dict are strings), then we’ll need to join them up. Fortunately, that’s easy as well. In fact, since we’re going to pass the results to a function taking one argument, there is a special syntax rule that will let us drop the square brackets, making things look quite a bit neater.

It’s also easier than you’re making it to initialize the dict in the first place; idiomatic Python code rarely actually needs the word dict.

Putting it all together:

kalg = {'a': '50075', 'b': '18099', 'c': '89885'} # etc.
name = input('Name: ')
print(''.join(kalg[letter] for letter in name if name in kalg))