PrintThis practice exercise does not do any geoprocessing or GIS, but it will help you get some experience working with functions and dictionaries. The latter will be especially helpful as you work on Project 4.
The objective
You've been given a text file of (completely fabricated) soccer scores from some of the most popular teams in Buenos Aires. Write a script that reads through the scores and prints each team name, followed by the maximum number of goals that team scored in a game, for example:
River: 5
Racing: 4
etc.
Keep in mind that the maximum number of goals scored might have come during a loss.
You are encouraged to use dictionaries to complete this exercise. This is probably the most efficient way to solve the problem. You'll also be able to write at least one function that will cut down on repeated code.
I have purposefully kept this text file short to make things simple to debug. This is an excellent exercise in using the debugger, especially to watch your dictionary as you step through each line of code.
This file is space-delimited, therefore, you must explicitly set up the CSV reader to use a space as the delimiter instead of the default comma. The syntax is as follows:
csvReader = csv.reader(scoresFile, delimiter=" ")
Tips
If you want a challenge, go ahead and start coding. Otherwise, here are some tips that can help you get started:
- Create variables for all your items of interest, including winner, winnerGoals, loser, and loserGoals and assign them appropriate values based on what you parsed out of the line of text. Because there are often ties in soccer, the term "winner" in this context means the first score given and the term "loser" means the second score given.
- Review chapter 6.8 on dictionaries in the Zandbergen text. You want to make a dictionary that has a key for each team, and an associated value that represents the team's maximum number of goals. If you looked at the dictionary in the debugger it would look like {'River': '5', 'Racing': '4', etc.}
- You can write a function that takes in three things: the key (team name), the number of goals, and the dictionary name. This function should then check if the key has an entry in the dictionary. If not, a key should be added and its value set to the current number of goals. If a key is found, you should perform a check to see if the current number of goals is higher than the value associated with that key. If so, you should set a new value. Notice how many "ifs" appear in the preceding sentences.