Question

In the following code, why does my code not iterate properly? I’m probably missing one line but I can’t figure out why it doesn’t work.

I have a function with the following test case:

>>> borda([['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'A', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'C', 'D', 'A']])
('B', [5, 8, 4, 1])

Where lists in the parameter are rankings, each #1 rank gets 3 points, #2 gets 2 points, #3 gets 1 point, and no other ranks get anything. There may not necessarily four choices. The first element in the tuple should be the choice with the highest number of points, and the second element is the number of points each choice got, in alphabetical order.

I’m not done with the function, but I’m trying to get a dictionary of the choices as the keys in alphabetical order and the count of rankings as the values, but the output is a dictionary of only the very last element of the last list in the parameter.

L = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'] #This is referenced outside the function since it might change
D = {}
i = 0
num = 0
while num < len(L):
    num += 1
    for choice in L:
        while i < len(parameter):
            for item in parameter:
                if item[0] == choice:
                    D[choice] = D.get(choice, 0) + 3
                if item[1] == choice:
                    D[choice] = D.get(choice, 0) + 2
                if item[2] == choice:
                    D[choice] = D.get(choice, 0) + 1
                i += 1
return D

Answer 1

The way I’d do this is something like this:

import operator
from collections import defaultdict
listoflists = [['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'A', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'C', 'D', 'A']]

def borda(listoflists):
   outdict = defaultdict(int)
   for item in listoflists:
      outdict[item[0]] += 3
      outdict[item[1]] += 2
      outdict[item[2]] += 1

   highestitem = max(outdict.iteritems(), key=operator.itemgetter(1))[0]
   outlist = [outdict[item[0]] for item in sorted(outdict.keys())]

   return (highestitem, outlist)

Update:
I’m not sure why you wouldn’t be able to import standard modules, but if for whatever reason you’re forbidden from using the import statement, here’s a version with only built-in functions:

listoflists = [['A', 'B', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'A', 'C', 'D'], ['B', 'C', 'D', 'A']]

def borda(listoflists):
    outdict = {}
    for singlelist in listoflists:
        # Below, we're just turning singlelist around in order to
        # make use of index numbers from enumerate to add to the scores
        for index, item in enumerate(singlelist[2::-1]):
            if item not in outdict:
                outdict[item] = index + 1
            else:
                outdict[item] += index + 1

    highestitem = max(outdict.iteritems(), key=lambda i: i[1])[0]
    outlist = [outdict[item[0]] for item in sorted(outdict.keys())]

    return (highestitem, outlist)