CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-3.xtypeerror
BBEng
BBEng

Reputation: 155

Missing 1 potential argument

this is my first post on this website, i'm taking an online course for intro to programming and it's pretty tough for an intro. I have no previous experience with coding and python is the first language i'm learning so please forgive me if I'm doing something wrong on the forum...Anyways here is the question:

So my question is, how can i satisfy the arguments in a function ?. For example, i have a function that checks some things from previous code (i'm writing a shakespearian insult generator with some extra stuff like alphabetically sorting, saving, file I/O, etc.), and I cannot get my deffunction to work... It keeps giving me a missing 1 potential argument numInsults error. How can i satisfy this condition?

def checkInsultsFile(numInsults, Insults="Insults.txt"):
    numInsults = number
    isItAlpha = "Insults.txt".isalpha()
    if isItAlpha:
        return True

I need this function to return true if my insults text file is alphabetical and if number of insults(numInsults) is legal (within 100-10000 and an integer) which i made sure it was legal using another function called getNumInsults which = numInsults

and number is from a previous function...

number = int(input("\nHow many insults do you want? \
Enter in range 100 to 10,000: "))

I hope I included everything for an answer...My summerized question is: How can i stop getting the error?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 609

Answers (2)

tytk
tytk

Reputation: 2332

How are you calling the function? You've defined it to take 1-2 arguments, but it needs at least 1 argument My guess is, elsewhere in your code, you have:

isOk = checkInsultsFile()

when what you should have is:

isOk = checkInsultsFile(101)

or, with the optional argument:

isOk = checkInsultsFile(101, "myInsults.txt")

EDIT:

Although OP didn't say, I believe the function in question is actually part of a class, in which case its first argument should be self. So the definition should actually be:

def checkInsultsFile(self, numInsults, Insults="Insults.txt"):
    ...

although you would still call the function as above.

Upvotes: 0

gabhijit
gabhijit

Reputation: 3585

I see a couple of problems with this code, may be you could fix those and try

In the following two lines

def checkInsultsFile(numInsults, Insults="Insults.txt"):
    numInsults = number ## Wrong: number is not known and numInsults assigned not a good idea)

There is a problem - you are passing numInsults to the function and assigning value to it again in the next line. That's certainly not desired/expected. numInsults will be available in your program when you pass it as a parameter. Also number is not defined anywhere, is it defined somewhere else in the file? That's a potential error. Remember - usually you should not assign values to the parameters passed to the function (There are cases in other programming languages where it might be required/useful but not here).

The second argument has a default value "Insults.txt", this is useful in Python and it let's you call the function checkInsults in following way - all three are legal

checkInsults(10) # no value for Insults parameter - default is used
checkInsults(10, "another_insult.txt") # Insult is now set to "another_insult.txt"

However following is illegal 

checkInsults() # Here numInsults an integer is expected to be passed and you are passing nothing

so this should give an error. `Expects 1 argument got 0 or something like that, but your error condition is something not I have commonly seen in Python.

Hope that helps to get you started and fix the code and hopefully fix the error yourself.

Upvotes: 1

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