[Tutor] need a hint

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 2 December 2013 02:25, Byron Ruffin <byron.ruffin at g.austincc.edu> wrote:
>
> The following program works and does what I want except for one last problem
> I need to handle.   The program reads a txt file of senators and their
> associated states and when I input the last name it gives me their state.
> The problem is "Udall".  There are two of them.  The txt file is read by
> line and put into a dictionary with the names split.  I need a process to
> handle duplicate names.  Preferably one that will always work even if the
> txt file was changed/updated.  I don't want the process to handle the name
> "Udall" specifically.   For a duplicate name I would like to tell the user
> it is not a unique last name and then tell them to enter first name and then
> return the state of that senator.

You're currently doing this:

>     senateInfo = {}
>         senateInfo[lastName] = state

Instead of storing just a state in the dict you could store a list of
states e.g.:

    senateInfo[lastName] = [state]

Then when you find a lastName that is already in the dict you can do:

    senateInfo[lastName].append(state)

to append the new state to the existing list of states. You'll need a
way to test if a particular lastName is already in the dict e.g.:

    if lastName in senateInfo:


Oscar