Question

The code was too long to past here, so it’s on PasteBin: http://pastebin.com/UDPFYsLJ

What I want to happen is to be able to put in something like “555-GET-FOOD” and get “555-438-3663”.

I have the code changing the letters to numbers…just on completely different lines. Here’s a small excerpt:

Number:  555-GET-FOO3
Number:  555-4ET-FOOD
Number:  555-GET-3OOD

It’s changing the letters correctly and leaving the numbers alone, but it’s all on different lines. I know I have it running in a for loop, but I want the changes made to the previous loop to stay with the current loop.

For example, if the first loop returns 555-GET-FOO3, I want the next loop to pick that up so that it could return 555-4ET-FOO3.

I’m just not sure how to do that.

Any tips would be great. I’ve also been looking over this thread: Removing a list of characters in string

However, I haven’t done much (or, well, anything) with the translate function and am having a hard time finding a good walkthrough outside of the Python Docs.

This is for school and we can’t use Python 3, we have to use Python 2.7, so I don’t think maketranslate will work.

Answer 1

All you have to do is change this

for i, j in dict.iteritems():
    newNumber = phoneNum.replace(i, j)
    print "Number: ",newNumber

to this:

for i, j in dict.iteritems():
    phoneNum = phoneNum.replace(i, j)
    print "Number: ",newNumber

Explanation:

In your method, you replace some characters in the original phone number and assign the result to a new variable called newNumber. But then, you do nothing with newNumber, so it gets thrown away.

Instead, if you overwrite the input (phoneNum) with the result of the translation, then any new translations that you make will be made with the newly overwritten value of phoneNum, thereby making all changes cumulative