Doctest failing

[Terry Reedy]

On 9/10/2011 7:20 AM, Tigerstyle wrote:
> Hi guys.
>
> I'm strugglin with some homework stuff and am hoping you can help me
> out here.

We appreciate you saying so instead of hiding that this is homework.

> small_words = ('into', 'the', 'a', 'of', 'at', 'in', 'for', 'on')
>
> def book_title(title):
>      """ Takes a string and returns a title-case string.
>      All words EXCEPT for small words are made title case
>      unless the string starts with a preposition, in which
>      case the word is correctly capitalized.
>      >>>  book_title('DIVE Into python')
>      'Dive into Python'
>      >>>  book_title('the great gatsby')
>      'The Great Gatsby'
>      >>>  book_title('the WORKS OF AleXANDer dumas')
>      'The Works of Alexander Dumas'
>      """
>      new_title = []
>      title_split = title.strip().lower().split()

>      for word in title_split:
>          if title_split[0] in small_words:
>              new_title.append(word.title())
>          elif word in small_words:
>              new_title.append(word.lower())
>          else:
>              new_title.append(word.title())

The key issue is that you want to treat the first word one way (.title 
it) and the rest differently (conditionally .title or not) . So 
immediately separate the first from the rest and then process each. 
There are at least three ways to do the split. Perhaps I should stop 
with this hint, and certainly you should think a bit before reading 
further, but here is what I consider to be the most elegant 3.2 code.
.
,
,
,
.
.
.
     first, *rest = title.strip().lower().split()
     new_title = [first.title()]
     for word in rest:
         if word not in small_words:
             word = word.title()
         new_title.append(word)

>      return(' '.join(new_title))

doctest.testmod() now passes (there is no 'refactory' here)

> def _test():
>      import doctest, refactory
>      return doctest.testmod(refactory)
> if __name__ == "__main__":
>      _test()

-- 
Terry Jan Reedy