[Tutor] Please help, the program is not behaving as I want

[Andre Engels]

I am not able to check your code (I get an error message about the
usage of urllib, but that might be a difference in Python
installations); however, my first guess is that you neglected to take
case into account: The page contains the text "Water", not "water", so
if you input "water", halal_haram_status will be -1.

As another remark, find() will give the value of the _beginning_ of
the match, thus when all goes right, what is returned will contain
part of the text sought rather than "Halal" or "Haram" - you will get
"er Ha" for water, "anol " for ethanol and "k cho" for pork chops
(also, ethanol is the same as alcohol, so I guess it should be haram).

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 5:20 PM, I. Dooba <idooba at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm new to programming and have decided to start with Python following the
> advice of experts including Eric S. Raymond.
> So far I've learnt quite a lot from this list.
> However, I've the following problem.
> The program was designed (as part of my practice with Head First
> Programming) to check whether an ingredient is Halal or Haram.
> I've a simple table online where some ingredients are either halal or
>  haram.
> For example, if the user enters "water" the program is supposed to tell him
> that it's halal;
> but it's returning "&gt;" and other characters I don't want to see.
> What am I doing wrong?
> import urllib.request
> page =
> urllib.request.urlopen("http://halalingredients.theparleyonline.com/")
> text = page.read().decode("utf8")
>
> halal_haram_status = text.find(input("Enter the ingredient:  "))
> begin_final_status = halal_haram_status + 3
> end_final_status = begin_final_status + 5
> status = text[begin_final_status:end_final_status]
> print(status)
>
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-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com