need help

Hi shihab solaman,

Just going to work through this one with you ...

Create a function named combiner that takes a single argument (we're told later it's a list)

def combiner(someList):

which will be a list made up of strings and numbers. (example given: ["apple", 5.2, "dog", 8])

This will be passed in the testing ... just take note that multiple number types can be passed in ... i.e. int and float

We know we'll need some temporary variables, one for string values and one for number values

myString = '' # initializing with empty string
sumOfNums = 0 # initializing with a 0 value

Return a single string that is a combination of all of the strings in the list and then the sum of all of the numbers. (outcome to example list given: appledog13.2)

So we know we're going to need to iterate through the passed in list

for entry in someList:

Be sure to use isinstance to solve this as I might try to trick you.

Now with each entry we need to determine if it's a string, int, or float. Let's use a couple of if statements, you can do this several ways, this is just the way I'm going to demo it though.

  if isinstance(entry, str):
    myString += entry

  if isinstance(entry, (int, float)): # of note here is that we're checking the type against both int AND float
    sumOfNums += entry 

Now that we have all the strings joined together, and all the number values added up, let's join them together and return it as a single string:

  myString += str(sumOfNums)
  return myString

And ... we're done

I hope this breakdown helps you out.
Please take a moment to think about each part we've gone through above (rather than just copy/paste the code).

OK, so if you've followed along you should now have something that looks like this:

def combiner(someList):
    myString = ''
    sumOfNums = 0

    for entry in someList:
        if isinstance(entry, str):
            myString += entry   
        if isinstance(entry, (int, float, complex)):
            sumOfNums += entry

    myString += str(sumOfNums)
    return myString

Best of luck, and happy coding,
Dave

Thanks Dave,

Btw I noticed that if you forget to add float on second if, you get an error message.