Question

Right now my flashcard game is using a prepvocab() method where I

• define the terms and translations for a week’s worth of terms as a dictionary
• add a description of that week’s terms
• lump them into a list of dictionaries, where a user selects their “weeks” to study

Every time I add a new week’s worth of terms and translations, I’m stuck adding another element to the list of available dictionaries. I can definitely see this as not being a Good Thing.

class Vocab(object):

def __init__(self):
    vocab = {}
    self.new_vocab = vocab
    self.prepvocab()

def prepvocab(self):
    week01 = {"term":"translation"} #and many more...
    week01d = "Simple Latvian words"

    week02 = {"term":"translation"}
    week02d = "Simple Latvian colors"

    week03 = {"I need to add this":"to self.selvocab below"}
    week03d = "Body parts"

    self.selvocab = [week01, week02] #, week03, weekn]
    self.descs = [week01d, week02d] #, week03, weekn]
    Vocab.selvocab(self)

def selvocab(self):
    """I like this because as long as I maintain self.selvocab,
    the for loop cycles through the options just fine"""
    for x in range(self.selvocab):
        YN = input("Would you like to add week " \
                   + repr(x + 1) + " vocab? (y or n) \n" \
                   "Description: " + self.descs[x] + " ").lower()
        if YN in "yes":
            self.new_vocab.update(self.selvocab[x])
    self.makevocab()

I can definitely see that this is going to be a pain with 20+ yes no questions. I’m reading up on curses at the moment, and was thinking of printing all the descriptions at once, and letting the user pick all that they’d like to study for the round.

How do I keep this part of my code better maintained? Anybody got a radical overhaul that isn’t so….procedural?

Answer 1

Pickling objects into a database means it’ll take some effort to create an interface to modify the weekly lessons from the front end, but is well worth the time.