[Tutor] Menus with dictionaries or lists?

[Alan Gauld]

"Norman Khine" <norman at khine.net> wrote

> I have a csv file as follows:
>
> "er";"Eritrea";"none";"none"
> "us";"United States of America";"Alabama";"Central Alabama"
> "uk";"United Kingdom";"East Anglia";"Cambridgeshire"
> "uk";"United Kingdom";"East Anglia";"Norfolk"
> "fr";"France";"Aquitaine";"Dordogne"
>
> I am trying to figure out a script on the command line so that you 
> get a navigation through which a user can drill down by:
>
> Country
> ->Region
> -->County

Welcome message...
There are XXX records to choose from.
Select a main criteria for filtering list:
Country(C), Region(R), District(D)?

<Display filtered list or a message saying how many selected>

Select a secondary criteria for filtering list:
Region(R), District(D)?

<Display filtered list or a message saying how many selected if > 
20,say>

Select a District for filtering list:
<List of Unique districts> or <Regex entry field>

Display final list matching criteria.

Provide option for going back a level at each prompt.

> I have some countries for which I don't have data for region or 
> county and I would want to exclude this from the list and only 
> include the country that has a county.

Not quite sure what you mean, but if you just don't want to display
them thats fairly straightforward to do by testing each record before
printing.


> What is the most effective way to do this.

For low data volumes what I've suggested abopve will work with
an in-memory data store - list or dictionary. If volumes are bigger
you may be better buuilding sa SqlLite database and building
up a dynamic SQL query string.

HTH,

-- 
Alan Gauld
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.freenetpages.co.uk/hp/alan.gauld