CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythoninput
pwn'cat
pwn'cat

Reputation: 111

Python – break down user input

In my Python script I have a menu which accepts user input, then based on that input will print some lines with information. It looks kind of like this:

while True:
    # Print the menu
    choice = raw_input('Pick an option: ')
    if choice == 'item_1':
        # Display item_1's contents
    elif choice == 'item_2':
        # Display item_2's contents
    # etc...

The information displayed by each item_ is slightly larger than I want it to be, so I want to split each of them into multiple pages.

To access those different pages I want it to be based on the user input, but rather than having an entirely different input for each page, I want the user to be able to write the page number next to the original input (with a space in between). So if the user inputs item_1 or item_1 1 they get the first page of item_1, and if they input item_2 2 they get the second page of item_2, and so on.

How can I break the user input into parts to do the aforementioned?

===========================================================================

EDIT

I was a little bit misleading about each item and what it does. Earlier in the script I have this:

def item_1():
    # Print line 1
    # Sleep
    # Print line 2
    # Sleep
    # Print line 3

def item_2():
    # Print line 1
    # Sleep
    # Print line 2
    # Sleep
    # Print line 3

What I really want to do is define more functions, one for each page, and then call them when the user inputs a number after the `item' (sort of like parsing arguments). Like this:

Input item_1 or item_1 1 >> Output item_1()

Input item_1 2 >> Output item_1_p2()

Input item_3 4 >> Output item_3_p4()

And, as seen in the first input example, I'd like the first page of a given input to be displayed if no pages are mentioned in the input.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1067

Answers (1)

TigerhawkT3
TigerhawkT3

Reputation: 49320

Use a dictionary that holds a list of strings for each item:

book = {'item_1':['page 1', 'page 2', 'page 3'], 'item_2':['page 1', 'page 2', 'page 3']}

while True:
    choice = raw_input('Pick an option: ').split()
    if not choice:
        break
    if len(choice) == 1:
        for page in book[choice[0]]:
            print page
    else:
        print book[choice[0]][int(choice[1])-1]

First it splits the input on whitespace. If the user had simply hit Enter with no characters, it'll stop. Otherwise, it'll do the following:

  1. Check how many terms resulted from the split
  2. If there's only one term, it's an 'item_x', so print the whole entry
  3. If there's more than one term, it's 'item_x' and a page number, so print the proper page

Upvotes: 2

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