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john larson
16,594 PointsCreate a function, most_courses that takes a teacher dictionary. return the teacher with the most courses
I got this code from stackoverflow. It works local but won't pass the challenge. Any glaring errors?
def most_courses(dct):
teacher = max(dct.keys(), key=(lambda k: dct[k]))
return teacher
2 Answers
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,426 PointsThe SO snippet has an error and does not produce the correct results. Once corrected, it passes Task 4 of the challenge so the validator seems to be working fine. The error is the lambda function.
The max function iterates over each element in the first parameter: the keys of the dict – the teacher names. If a key argument is present, the max function will use this argument (the lambda function) to evaluate each of these teacher names. In this code, each teacher name is passed to the lambda function as the argument k. The results of the lambda function is used as the basis for determining the maximum value.
So what does the existing lambda function do? It returns the value of the dictionary lookup using the teacher name. The result is the actual full list of each teacher's courses. Comparing in this way, the "max" is based on the alphabetical ordering of the first element in each list. That is, the starting character of the first course. Clearly not what you're looking for.
How can you change the lambda function to return the length of each list instead of returning the full list? Hint: I was able to add 5 characters to the lambda function to pass the task.
Post back if you're stuck.
If you have not covered lambda functions yet in your studies, I suggest trying to solve the most_courses task using a different technique. Good luck!!
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest TeacherOn my phone so I can't check the validator but...Do you understand what's going on in this? I'm not a fan of answers copied and pasted from SO, as I'm sure you can understand.
Alexander Davison
65,469 PointsAlexander Davison
65,469 PointsTagging Chris Freeman for his amazing answers
Also tagging Kenneth Love in case there's a glitch in the code challenge. (Your program seems to work on my machine, too.)