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Python Python Collections (Retired) Dictionaries Teacher Stats

Steven Wheeler
Steven Wheeler
2,330 Points

Help with sorting dictionaries?

I am stuck on the Python challenge: "Create a function named stats that takes a dictionary of teachers and returns a list of lists in the format: ["name", "number of classes"]

My existing code is here, any advice on how to start thinking about it will be appreciated.. I honestly can't think how to go about doing it:

teachers.py
teachers = {'Jason Seifer': ['Ruby Foundations', 'Ruby on Rails Forms', 'Technology Foundations'],
  'Kenneth Love': ['Python Basics', 'Python Collections']}



def most_classes(teachers):
    max_count = 0
    max_teacher = ''
    for key in teachers:
        class_count = len(teachers[key])
        if class_count > max_count:
            max_teacher = key
            max_count = class_count
    return max_teacher

def num_teachers(teachers):
  teacherNumber = 0;
  for teacher in teachers:
    teacherNumber += 1
  return teacherNumber

def stats(teachers):

2 Answers

Steven,

Since the results will be a list you will need an empty list to append the results to.

myList = []

Since you will be checking all teachers and their classes you need a loop:

for teacher in passed_in_dictionary:

You also need to count all the classes for each teacher and append the results to the list:

myList.append([teacher,len(passed_in_dictionary[teacher])])

And then return the results. Does that help?

Ron

Steven Wheeler
Steven Wheeler
2,330 Points

Hi Ron,

It helps but I still haven't quite got it working. I think for every task in "dictionaries" I've asked for help on these forums! -_-

teachers = {'Jason Seifer': ['Ruby Foundations', 'Ruby on Rails Forms', 'Technology Foundations'],
  'Kenneth Love': ['Python Basics', 'Python Collections']}



def most_classes(teachers):
    max_count = 0
    max_teacher = ''
    for key in teachers:
        class_count = len(teachers[key])
        if class_count > max_count:
            max_teacher = key
            max_count = class_count
    return max_teacher

def num_teachers(teachers):
  teacherNumber = 0;
  for teacher in teachers:
    teacherNumber += 1
  return teacherNumber


def stats(teachers):
    myList = []
    for item in teachers:
      myList.append([item, len.teachers[item]])
    return myList

I'm getting the error "builtin_function_or_method' object has no attribute 'teachers'".

I've made a list then tried to make a "list of lists". In my eyes it should add the "item" (teacher name) followed by the length of the value (the number of classes). I'm not sure where I have gone wrong :o.

Steven,

len() is a function and should be len(teachers[item])

Ron

Steven Wheeler
Steven Wheeler
2,330 Points

I swear this challenge was designed by Satan (sorry Kenneth).

The final task is: "Write a function named courses that takes the dictionary of teachers. It should return a list of all of the courses offered by all of the teachers."

Easy right?... So I did:

teachers = {'Jason Seifer': ['Ruby Foundations', 'Ruby on Rails Forms', 'Technology Foundations'],
  'Kenneth Love': ['Python Basics', 'Python Collections']

def courses(teachers):
    for item in teachers.values():
        print item

Other code omitted for ease of reading.

And nope, it gives me this error: You returned 4 courses, you should have returned 18.

I can list it nicely with each teacher's name and showing all their courses or whatever but apparently I'm meant to be returning "18" courses.

Kenneth Love
Kenneth Love
Treehouse Guest Teacher

All Hail Ken-- I mean, wow, sorry about that.

Yes, these are challenging challenges, but they're also fairly real world challenges. You'll work with dictionaries all the time in Python and you really need to know how to manipulate them to whatever ends you want.

Remember, too, that we're always going to want to return in functions instead of print(), at least in code challenges (and 99.9% of the code you write anyway). You'll probably want to use .extend() for that last challenge.

Steven Wheeler
Steven Wheeler
2,330 Points

Kenneth- It was more my fault for not completely understanding the wording. I extended it into its own list (rather than just returning every item) and returned that.. task done -___-. I think I need to find some projects to work on using dictionaries more.

Thanks for the help all