python -Weird Print... HW

Question

Write a function called exactly weird() which takes three strings as arguments and prints the longest one backwards. (In the case of a tie, the string which is the earlier argument should be selected.

The function call:

weird("I", "Love", "Python")

Should result in the following terminal output:

nohtyP

This is what I have done so far.. am not getting the scratch part right ...

running = True

while running:

    word = raw_input("Enter word:")

    if word[0] in "aeiou":
        print word + "yay"
    else:
        print word[1:] + word[0] + "ay"

You seem to have two different things..one being actual pig latin, and one being backwards printing. — PrettyPrincessKitty FS, Apr 07 '11 at 20:47
Your title, question, and sample code seem to be about different things. — oosterwal, Apr 07 '11 at 20:49
oh yea am sorry.. i was doing that piglatin problem too.. sorry for that — Sarah, Apr 07 '11 at 20:57
Please label your homework with the [homework] tag. Please try to actually make sense of your question before posting it. — S.Lott, Apr 07 '11 at 21:04
@zawa: Not really. "am not getting the scratch part right" is vague and confusing. What **specifically** is your problem? Error? Wrong results? Please be as detailed and specific as you can. — S.Lott, Apr 07 '11 at 21:10

Drew D. · Answer 1 · 2011-04-15T08:03:55.180

4

A faster approach (and it works for an arbitrary number of strings) is:

def weird(*s):
    return sorted(s,key=len,reverse=True)[0][::-1]

edited Apr 15 '11 at 08:03

answered Apr 15 '11 at 07:52

Drew D.

411
3
9

adding a '*' in front of an argument means you can pass in as many arguments as you want and Python treats it as a list of arguments. – Drew D. Apr 15 '11 at 08:29
+1 for generalization of input, and I wish I could do +1 for the FP approach :) – Arnab Datta Mar 02 '12 at 14:39

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:33

Unfortunately I'm somewhat of a novice myself with python, but the simplest way I see to do this is refer to this Reverse a string in Python to see a simple way to reverse a string. For the logic of picking which string to reverse, it would be easiest to create a list and store a max string based on length.

Here's a possible solution, using the reverse method on the other thread. Ideally, this method would just take one list as an argument, since then it would work for all sizes of input.

def weird(strOne, strTwo, strThree):
    strings = [strOne, strTwo, strThree]
    max = ""
    for x in strings:
        if len(max) < len(x):
            max = x
    print max[::-1]

weird("I", "Love", "Python")

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered May 01 '11 at 11:58

def weird(str1, str2, str3):
    # sort them according to length
    # guaranteed stable sort
    strings= sorted( (str1, str2, str3), key=len)
    # maximum_length is the length of the last one
    maximum_length= len(strings[-1])

    # now return the earliest (str1 < str2 < str3)
    # having len() == maximum_length
    for a_string in reversed(strings):
        if len(a_string) < maximum_length:
            break
        result= a_string

    return result[::-1]

python -Weird Print... HW

3 Answers3