On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:19:51 am Siren Saren wrote:
> I'm still fairly new to programming.
[...]
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> I've seen a lot of examples in books for dealing with lists of
> alternating data types, but what about a list that doesn't follow a
> simple numeric pattern?
The general solution to that is, avoid it.
[...]
> Probably easier to choose one of these. So pretend I have a list
> like this:
>
> (Crime and punishment, page 10, page 40, page 30, Brother's
> Karamazov, page 22, page 55, page 9000, Father's and Sons, page 100,
> Anna Karenina, page 1, page 2, page 4, page 7, page 9)
The simplest way to deal with that is to put the pages into sub-lists,
and combine the title and pages into a tuple:
booklist = [
("Crime and punishment", [10, 40, 30]),
("Brother's Karamazov", [22, 55, 9000]), # That's a big book!
("Father's and Sons", [100]),
("Anna Karenina", [1, 2, 4, 7, 9]),
]
Now you can iterate over the collection:
for title, pages in booklist:
print title
for page in pages:
print "page", page
or do whatever other work you need on them. Notice that the outer list
is now easy to work with: every element of the outer list is the same,
a tuple of two items. The inner lists are also easy to deal with: every
element is simply a page number.
An alternative is a dictionary:
books = {
"Crime and punishment": [10, 40, 30],
"Brother's Karamazov": [22, 55, 9000],
"Father's and Sons": [100],
"Anna Karenina": [1, 2, 4, 7, 9],
"Where's Wally?": [],
}
Now each key is simply the title, and the value is a list of page
numbers.
--
Steven D'Aprano
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