Dictionary Help! Extracting values and making a table

Question

Here\'s the question that I\'m supposed to code for:

Write the contract, docstring and implementation for a function showCast that takes a movie title and

Answer 1

First, i don't think you should return anything in the addMovie function. Just simply add it to the global variable:

myIMDb = {}

def addMovie (title, charList, actList):
    global myIMDb

    """The function addMovie takes a title of the movie, a list of characters,
    and a list of actors. (The order of characters and actors match one
    another.) The function addMovie adds a pair to myIMDb. The key is the title
    of the movie while the value is a dictionary that matches characters to
    actors"""

    dict2 = {}
    for i in range (0, len(charList)):
        dict2 [charList[i]] = actList[i]
    myIMDb[title] = dict2

Although i don't recommend to use global variables often, i think it's forgivable in this case :D

After that, in your showCast function, i'd use this:

def showCast(title):
    if title in myIMDb:
        actList=[]
        chList=[]
        movie = myIMDb[title]
        for character, cast in movie.keys(), movie.values(): #grab the character from
        #the keys, and cast from the values. 
              chList.append(character)
              actList.append(cast)

        print (chList, actList)
    else:
        return "Movie not Found"

Here's my output:

['Columbus', 'Jesse Eisenberg, '] ['Wichita', 'Emma Stone']

It's working as expected, hope this helps!

Answer 2

Maybe these snippets help you:

Printing a table row

def printRow(character, actor):
    print(character + (20 - len(character)) * ' ' + actor))

Sorting the characters

def getSortedTitleList(titleList):
    sortedList = []
    characters = sorted(titleList)
    for character in characters:
        sortedList.append((character, titleList[character]))
    return sortedList

Note: I changed dict.keys().sort() to sorted(dict) to be compatible with Python 3.