CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Alex_Joo
Alex_Joo

Reputation: 3

How to make a function instead of overusing if statements in python?

Working with a morse code translator!
I have a program that gets an input from a user, to example "Hello", and then I need to read of each character and transform it to morse code time units.

The way I do it is that I use short period for 0 and long period for 1. I made a lot of variables from A-Z, 0-9, and wrote "byte" code for each. It got pretty big.

Then eventually I had to make a function that reads the input and puts all the zeros and ones in one big string with help of these variables I made. And here I got stuck, because I wasn't ready to make 35 if statements.

'''
Function that compiles all the letters from input together
to a 0/1 code
'''
morse = "" # the string that will include "byte code"

def compile(text):
    for c in text:
        # here I got stuck


# Alphabet
A = "01"
B = "1000"
C = "1010"
D = "100"
E = "0"
# .....

I would like to know if there is any actual solution to this mess, how to write this function without overusing if statements.

I tried to be clear as possible, hope you understand.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 144

Answers (2)

J. Olsson
J. Olsson

Reputation: 98

Your best bet will be to use a dictionary. Compile it like so:

alphabet = {
    "A": "01"
    "B": "02"
    ...
    "Z": "01111010"
}

And then in your for loop, you can do:

def compile(text):
    morse_string = ""
    for c in text.upper():
        morse_string += alphabet[c]
    return morse_string

Or something along those lines.

You can find more about dictionaries (and other datastructures) here.

Upvotes: 1

Barmar
Barmar

Reputation: 780994

Use a dictionary to map from letters to codes.

morse_dict = {"A": "01", "B": "1000", "C": "1010", ...}

def compile(text):
    return " ".join(morse_dict[c] for c in text.upper())

Upvotes: 0

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