--Originally published at Carolina's Blog Site

So when you ask the user for input, you need it to give you a valid input, something you can do whatever it is you wanted to do with it. For example, let’s say you ask for the user’s age because you wanna add something to it. Well, the user might write bdjsfkfs, you never know! So you must prepare accordingly.

First of all, be sure to specify when asking the user for input. Do not assume they know what you want from them. Have the program say things like “only integers, or rounded to the nearest whole number or in military time please.”

Now, when asking for input, it will always be given as a string, and you won’t be able to do math operations with it.

One thing you must do is transform the user input into a number by using the int function. That way Python will automatically turn it into an integer and will be able to do math operations with it. Example:

age = int(input("Please enter your age: "))

Another great thing you can use in Python is the try/except statement, like this:

def valid_user_input(x):
    try:          #what you want it to do
        return int(x) > 2
    except ValueError:     #if an error happens,
        print ("please type an integer")     #do this
        return None

 

--Originally published at Carolina's Blog Site

So, I’ve heard that programmers should always avoid global variables, and I never really understood why. I think this article explains it really well:

--Originally published at Carolina's Blog Site

Challenge: create a program that takes three numbers as arguments and returns the largest of them.

At first I got all confused and started making unnecessary loops. It was very frustrating.

Then Ken reminded me that when creating a program, first you must think about it logically, forget about the sintax: what does your program need to do? how would a human do that? how would you explain it in pen and paper?

That made things a lot easier. IMPORTANT ADVICE TO REMEMBER.

So then, basically what I did was assume that the first integer given by the user was the biggest one, created a variable for it, and then I compared it with the other values and changed it if necessary.

Here’s my code, hope it’s helpful: https://github.com/cpvp20/max_of_three

 

sources:

http://giphy.com/gifs/money-help-wwyb-vsZF2hC9cH0Mo

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sudden-clarity-clarence

--Originally published at Carolina's Blog Site

Hey so… palindromes,

So I didn’t know this before last week, but a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backward or forward, such as kayak or racecar.

Anyways, Angel and I made a program during Ken’s class that takes user input, splits it into words, and feeds back which ones are palindromes and which ones are not, and it works YAY!

Since there’s no built in  reverse function in Python strings, we created a function that reverses a string by slicing it… more about this at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/931092/reverse-a-string-in-python.

So yeah, check out our code at https://github.com/cpvp20/palindrome/blob/master/palindrome.py

sources:

http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3u0jqj

http://giphy.com/gifs/dancing-fresh-prince-of-bel-air-carlton-pa37AAGzKXoek