Gfrktyl

I must create a program that takes a user's input of a State and it returns that States state flower. The following text file I must read is called "state_flowers.txt" and it contains the following data

California,Poppy

West Virginia,Rhododendron

South Dakota,Pasque Flower

Connecticut,Mountain Laurel

New York,Rose

Georgia,Cherokee Rose

Washington,Coast Rhododendron

Virgina,American Dogwood

Arizona,Saguaro Cactus

Hawaii,Pua Aloalo

Alabama,Camelia

Illinois,Violet

Indiana,Peony

Delaware,Peach Blossom

Iowa,Wild Prairie Rose

Kansas,Sunflower

Alaska,Forget Me Not

Lousiana,Magnolia

Maine,White Pine Tassel

Massachusetts,Trailing Arbutus

Michigan,Apple Blossom

Minnesota,Lady Slipper

Mississippi,Magnolia

Missouri,Hawthorn

Montana,Bitterroot

Nebraska,Goldenrod

Nevada,Sagebrush

New Hampshire,Lilac

New Jersy,Violet

New Mexico,Yucca Flower

etc......

The problem that I'm experiencing with my code is that it will only ask for the input of the state's name and continue to do that over and over again with no output. Here is what I have for code so far:

d = {}

myFile = open('state_flowers.txt', 'r')

for line in myFile:

    line2=line.split(",")

    state = line2[0]

    flower = line2[1]

    c = len(flower)-1 

    #Strips the new line symbol

    flower = flower[0:c]

    d[state] = flower 

    #matches each state with its flower



for state, flower in d.items():   

    search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

    if state == search:                   

        print(flower, "is the State Flower for", state)

As I said, all my program asks for is the input over and over again. So it does as such:

Enter state name:Maine

Enter state name:Califorina

Enter state name:Texas

Enter state name:

Enter state name:

I feel as if I'm very close on this, any help is appreciated and a clear explanation of what I am doing incorrectly would be much appreciated! Thank you!

You are close. There's no need to iterate your dictionary. The beauty of dict is it offers O(1) access to values given a key. You can just take your input and feed the key to your dictionary:

search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

print(d.get(search), "is the State Flower for", search)

With Python 3.6+, you can write this more clearly using f-strings:

print(f'{d.get(search)} is the State Flower for {search}')

If the state doesn't exist in your dictionary d.get(search) will return None. If you don't want to print anything in this situation, you can use an if statement:

search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

if search in d:

    print(f'{d[search]} is the State Flower for {search}')

Your problem is that in your code:

for state, flower in d.items():   

    search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

    if state == search:                   

        print(flower, "is the State Flower for", state)

you loop through all the state/flower pairs, and ask for a state name, each time. So if you have fifty state/flower pairs, the user will be asked fifty times. This is not what you want.

Instead, move the line that contains the input(...) statement to outside (that is, before) the loop. What way, the loop won't begin until after it's asked for.

As for the input line and the loop:

search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

for state, flower in d.items():   

    if state == search:                   

        print(flower, "is the State Flower for", state)

consider replacing it with three non-loop lines:

state = input("Enter state name: ")

flower = d[state]

print(flower, "is the State Flower for", state)

And that's it. There's nothing to manually search for in a loop, since a dict object will search for you.

If you're concerned that the user mis-types a state name and you don't want your program to throw an exception, you can change the flower = d[state] line to:

flower = d.get(state, 'Nothing')

d.get(state) works pretty much the same way as d[state], except that you can specify what to set flower to (in this case, "Nothing") if the state isn't found in the dict.

You can try a simple debugging. Print the values of "state" and "search" just before the comparison condition. This condition isn't getting "True" hence it just iterates for user input:

for state, flower in d.items():   

    search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

    if state == search: 

        print(state,search)                  

        print(flower, "is the State Flower for", state)

I would save your data as a json, say state_flowers.json, in the following format:

    {

    "California":"Poppy", 

    "West Virginia":"Rhododendron", 

    ...

    }

Then you can just set up your function to return flowers based on dictionary keys:

        search = input("Enter state name:")    #user enters input of state

        if state == search:                   

            print(state_flowers["%s" %state], "is the State Flower for", %state)

This will use your state names as dictionary keys and retrieve the flowers associated with them from your json file.