Как сделать варианты ответа в python

Хочу создать несколько вариантов ответов

Например, перечислить в коллекции ( tuple , list , set , и т.п.) и через in проверить:

Либо стареньким способом через if :

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# Quiz — Викторина

Quiz — викторина или тест, программа с тестовыми вопросами.

Наш вид компьютерной викторины будет состоять из окна приветствия и нескольких вопросов, по очереди выводимых в окне.

Для выполнения цели: нужно уметь разбивать задачу на шаги и выполнять их в дальнейшем.

Будем придумывать, записывать и выполнять шаги по мере решения.��

# Step 1 — Шаг 1: приветствие

Создадим окно приветствия.

Для подключения библиотек tkinter используем рекомендованный формат подключения:

Создадим пустое окно с названием «My quiz».

Создадим рамку — LabelFrame, с названием «Generate screen» для наглядной визуализации. Далее все элементы будут создаваться в этой рамке:

Виджеты первого окна приветствия создадим отдельной функцией с параметром, в котором будет передаваться сам фрейм. В Label добавим текст приветствия: «Welcome to my quiz!n Press start to continue…». Последовательность символов n — означает, что следующий текст будет выводиться с новой строки. Добавив метку — Label и кнопку. Для которых укажем родительский элемент, переданный в функцию параметром el:

Для вызова функции поле создания окна и фрейма в вызовем функцию командой:

# Step 2 — Шаг 2: меняем содержание фрейма

Теперь создадим функцию с параметром, которая будет отображать вопросы с вариантами ответов. Вызываться эта функция будет кнопкой в которой задана команда: command=lambda e=el: ask_question(e). Имя функции будет соответственно: ask_question(el):

При вызове этой функции происходит следующее:

• функция принимает аргумент, которым является основной виждет LabelFrame;
• функция for перебирает все вложенные элементы в этот фрейм ранее и удаляет их;
• далее создаем новые элемент метку — Label(text=»Здесь могла быть Ваша реклама! n Или вопрос с вариантами ответов.»)

Результат выполнения, после нажатия кнопки:

# Step 3 — Шаг 3: вопрос с ответами

Предположим первый вопрос с вариантами ответов: Вопрос:

Какие виждеты используют для вывода текста с возможностью его редактирования? Which widgets using to display text with the ability to edit it?

• Canvas
• Listbox
• Entry
• Text
• Label

Для сохранения результата наших ответов, после строк импорта создадим переменную с пустым массивом (листом), в котором будем сохранять ответы:

Внесем изменения в функцию def ask_question(el): Для вопроса будем использовать виджет метку — Label():

А для вариантов ответа используем флажки — Checkbutton(), и у каждого флажка должна быть своя переменная. Выберем для неё тип переменной BooleanVar(), и хранить её будем в массиве answer. Чтобы добавить переменную в массив будем использовать метод .append(…) с параметром задающим тип переменной BooleanVar():

Остальные варианты ответа добавьте самостоятельно, используя копировать-вставить (copy-paste). Привязка новых элементов обязательно должна быть к передаваемому фрейм элементу el. Результат выполнения:

# Step 4 — Шаг 4: проверка ответов

Создадим функцию проверки ответов check(), после объявленной переменной answer, которая будет перебирать массив (лист) answer:

В конце функции def ask_question(el): создадим кнопку «Next >>», которая вызывает функцию проверки:

Пример результата вывода в консоль, который только отражает какие флажки были выбраны:

Для сохранения итоговых баллов создадим переменную points и переменную true_answers в которой будет храниться строка, состоящая из 0 и 1 (пример: 000110, где длинна это количество предлагаемых ответов, а 1 обозначают какие ответы правильные):

Для проверки выбранных ответов с правильными изменим check() функцию. Для одновременного перебора двух списков параллельно можно воспользоваться функцией zip():

Переменная t будет перебирать список true_answers, переменная a — answers. После преобразования bool(int(t)) в булевый тип, пример вывода в консоль:

Осталось вписать условие сравнения для подсчета результата. За каждый правильный ответ будем увеличивать баллы на 1 в результате неправильного уменьшать на 1, если вариант ответа не выбран, то баллы не изменяются:

Пример вывода в консоль:

# Step 5 — Шаг 5: вывод баллов в окно

Для вывода результата в окно продолжим изменять функцию check(), она должна принимать параметр, а именно фрейм в который выводится результат:

А также нужно изменить кнопку «Next >>»:

При запуске программы все должно работать как и ранее.

Теперь вместо строки print(points) пишем код очищающий фрейм:

А затем добавляем метку — Label() который выводит, например: «Ваш результат: -4 балла», количество баллов соответствует подсчету после ответа.

# Упражнения

Добавьте на последней форме кнопку «Try again», которая будет предлагать выполнение программы сначала.

Создайте переменную типа лист, в которой последовательно хранятся вопрос, ответы и правильная вариация ответов:

Измените программу так, чтобы данные для генерации вопросов брались из этой переменной. Желательно использовать срезы и перебор циклом.

Добавьте переменную с вопросом и ответами, с использованием дополнительного символа перед строкой:

«?» — означает вопрос, «+» — означает правильный ответ, «-» — означает неправильный ответ, «10110» — последовательность правильных вариантов вычеркиваем.

Добавьте этот вопрос в форму, с последующим отображением и подсчетом общего результата.

Диалог с пользователем через командную строку: программа Yes/No на Python

Диалоговые программы используются везде, примером может служить любое приложение на вашем компьютере (браузер, видеоплееры, текстовые редакторы и т. д.). Диалог Yes/No — это простой пример диалоговой программы, работающей с командной строкой.

Что такое диалоговая программа и зачем она нужна

Программа, в которой предусмотрено взаимодействие с пользователем, называется диалоговой (интерактивной).

Ввод текста, нажатия на кнопки, загрузка файлов — всё это способы взаимодействия пользователя с приложением.

Диалог между программой и пользователем — это важная часть любого проекта. Если программа работает с одними строго определенными данными, она не несёт какого-либо практического смысла.

Диалоговая программа Yes/No на Python

Диалог может вестись как через графический интерфейс, так и через командную строку. С помощью Python можно реализовать и то и другое, однако общение с пользователем через терминал имеет более простую реализацию и требует меньше кода.

Суть такой программы проста: пользователь отвечает на вопросы, вводя в консоль Yes – да, или No – нет. Не стоит думать, что сейчас актуально взаимодействовать с программой только через графический интерфейс, командная строка также используется.

Понятно, что диалог через командную строку чаще используется продвинутыми пользователями или техническими специалистами, которых не пугает работа в режиме текстовых команд.

Консольный диалог Yes/No особенно актуален, потому что не требует реализовывать графический интерфейс, который может быть бесполезен для выполнения определённых задач.

Реализация функции диалога Yes/No на Python

Написать консольную диалоговую программу на Python очень просто, однако нужно учесть и продумать некоторые нюансы, такие как неверный ввод от пользователя. Yes/no легко можно заменить на Да/нет, но давайте следовать общепринятым стандартам и использовать английский язык.

Объявление функции

Поместим всю логику диалоговой программы в отдельную функцию, которую объявим так:

Здесь аргументы означают следующее:

• question – это вопрос, который выводится в командную строку, и на который пользователь должен дать ответ «yes» или «no».
• default_ answer – это необязательный параметр, который будет использоваться в том случае, если пользователь не введет ответ, а просто нажмет Enter.

Начальные настройки

Предположим, что пользователь может вводить не только «yes», но и «y» или «ye». Обработка каждого вариант с помощью условных операторов if — else нецелесообразна и требует много лишнего кода. Поэтому поместим все варианты ответа в словарь:

default_answer позволяет указать предпочтительный вариант ответа, однако это не очевидно для обычного пользователя. В зависимости от содержимого default_answer будем выводить соответствующую подсказку:

При вводе аргумента default_answer тоже можно допустить ошибку, поэтому в блоке else мы возбуждаем исключение, которое указывает на неверный ввод.

Основной цикл

Необходимо продумать следующие ситуации, когда пользователь:

• Ничего не вводит, но определен default_answer .
• Вводит верный ответ.
• Вводит неверный ответ.

Для реализации лучше использовать бесконечный цикл. Сначала необходимо вывести вопрос и подсказку, а затем получить ввод пользователя:

Подробнее про ввод и вывод данных можно почитать здесь.

Теперь ввод необходимо обработать так, чтобы при правильном вводе происходил выход из цикла, а при неправильном цикл начинался заново:

Полный код функции

Соединив все вместе, получаем готовую к использованию функцию для диалога с пользователем:

Пример программы

Предположим, что функция получает несколько вопросов из файла, результаты ответов записываются в другой файл, тогда код программы будет выглядеть так:

С помощью метода строк strip удалим лишние символы.

Перед запуском программы на Python надо не забыть подготовить файл с вопросами qst.txt такого вида:

Чтобы русские буквы корректно отображались — правильно указываем кодировку при открытии файла. В моём случае это encoding=»utf-8″ .

Build a Quiz Application With Python

In this tutorial, you’ll build a Python quiz application for the terminal. The word quiz was first used in 1781 to mean eccentric person. Nowadays, it’s mostly used to describe short tests of trivia or expert knowledge with questions like the following:

When was the first known use of the word quiz?

By following along in this step-by-step project, you’ll build an application that can test a person’s expertise on a range of topics. You can use this project to strengthen your own knowledge or to challenge your friends to a fun battle of wits.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

• Interact with the user in the terminal
• Improve the usability of your application
• Refactor your application to continuously improve it
• Store data in dedicated data files

The quiz application is a comprehensive project for anyone comfortable with the basics of Python. Throughout the tutorial, you’ll get all the code you need in separate, bite-size steps. You can also find the full source code of the application by clicking on the link below:

Get Source Code: Click here to get access to the source code that you’ll use to build your quiz application.

Whether you’re an eccentric person or not, read on to learn how to create your own quiz.

Demo: Your Python Quiz Application

In this step-by-step project, you’ll build a terminal application that can quiz you and your friends on a range of topics:

You first choose a topic for your questions. Then, for each question, you’ll choose an answer from a set of alternatives. Some questions may have multiple correct answers. You can access a hint to help you along the way. After answering a question, you’ll read an explanation that can provide more context for the answer.

Project Overview

You’ll start by creating a basic Python quiz application that’s only capable of asking a question, collecting an answer, and checking whether the answer is correct. From there, you’ll add more and more features in order to make your app more interesting, user-friendly, and fun.

You’ll build the quiz application iteratively by going through the following steps:

1. Create a basic application that can ask multiple-choice questions.
2. Make the app more user-friendly by improving how it looks and how it handles user errors.
3. Refactor the code to use functions.
4. Separate question data from source code by storing questions in a dedicated data file.
5. Expand the app to handle multiple correct answers, give hints, and provide explanations.
6. Add interest by supporting different quiz topics to choose from.

As you follow along, you’ll gain experience in starting with a small script and expanding it. This is an important skill in and of itself. Your favorite program, app, or game probably started as a small proof of concept that later grew into what it is today.

Prerequisites

In this tutorial, you’ll build a quiz application using Python’s basic building blocks. While working through the steps, it’s helpful if you’re comfortable with the following concepts:

from the user at the terminal
• Organizing data in structures like lists, tuples, and dictionaries
• Using if statements to check different conditions
• Repeating actions with for and while loops
• Encapsulating code with functions

If you’re not confident in your knowledge of these prerequisites, then that’s okay too! In fact, going through this tutorial will help you practice these concepts. You can always stop and review the resources linked above if you get stuck.

Step 1: Ask Questions

In this step, you’ll learn how to create a program that can ask questions and check answers. This will be the foundation of your quiz application, which you’ll improve upon in the rest of the tutorial. At the end of this step, your program will look like this:

Your program will be able to ask questions and check answers. This version includes the basic functionality that you need, but you’ll add more functionality in later steps. If you prefer, then you can download the source code as it’ll look when you’re done with this step by clicking the link below and entering the source_code_step_1 directory:

Get Source Code: Click here to get access to the source code that you’ll use to build your quiz application.

Get User Information With input()

One of Python’s built-in functions is input() . You can use it to get information from the user. For a first example, run the following in a Python REPL:

input() takes an optional prompt that’s displayed to the user before the user enters information. In the example above, the prompt is shown in the highlighted line, and the user enters Geir Arne before hitting Enter . Whatever the user enters is returned from input() . This is seen in the REPL example, as the string ‘Geir Arne’ has been assigned to name .

You can use input() to have Python ask you questions and check your answers. Try the following:

This example shows one thing that you need to be aware of: input() always returns a text string, even if that string contains only digits. As you’ll soon see, this won’t be an issue for the quiz application. However, if you wanted to use the result of input() for mathematical calculations, then you’d need to convert it first.

Time to start building your quiz application. Open your editor and create the file quiz.py with the following content:

This code is very similar to what you experimented with in the REPL above. You can run your application to check your knowledge:

If you happen to give the wrong answer, then you’ll be gently corrected so that you’ll hopefully do better next time.

Note: The f before your quoted string literal inside the else clause indicates that the string is a formatted string, usually called an f-string. Python evaluates expressions inside curly braces ( <> ) within f-strings and inserts them into the string. You can optionally add different format specifiers.

For example, !r indicates that answer should be inserted based on its repr() representation. In practice, this means that strings are shown surrounded by single quotes, like ‘1871’ .

A quiz with only one question isn’t very exciting! You can ask another question by repeating your code:

You’ve added a question by copying and pasting the previous code then changing the question text and the correct answer. Again, you can test this by running the script:

It works! However, copying and pasting code like this isn’t great. There’s a programming principle called Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY), which says that you should usually avoid repeated code because it gets hard to maintain.

Next, you’ll start improving your code to make it easier to work with.

Use Lists and Tuples to Avoid Repetitive Code

Python provides several flexible and powerful data structures. You can usually replace repeated code with a tuple, a list, or a dictionary in combination with a for loop or a while loop.

Instead of repeating code, you’ll treat your questions and answers as data and move them into a data structure that your code can loop over. The immediate—and often challenging—question then becomes how you should structure your data.

There’s never one uniquely perfect data structure. You’ll usually choose between several alternatives. Throughout this tutorial, you’ll revisit your choice of data structure several times as your application grows.

For now, choose a fairly simple data structure:

• A list will hold several question elements.
• Each question element will be a two-tuple consisting of the question text and the answer.

You can then store your questions as follows:

This fits nicely with how you want to use your data. You’ll loop over each question, and for each question, you want access to both the question and answer.

Change your quiz.py file so that you store your questions and answers in the QUESTIONS data structure:

When you run this code, it shouldn’t look any different from how it did earlier. In fact, you haven’t added any new functionality. Instead, you’ve refactored your code so that it’ll be easier to add more questions to your application.

In the previous version of your code, you needed to add five new lines of code for each question that you added. Now, the for loop takes care of running those five lines for each question. To add a new question, you only need to add one line spelling out the question and the corresponding answer.

Note: You’re learning about quizzes in this tutorial, so questions and answers are important. Each code example will introduce a new question. To keep the code listings in this tutorial at a manageable size, some of the older questions may be removed. However, feel free to keep all questions in your code, or to even replace these with your own questions and answers.

The questions you’ll see in the examples are related to the tutorial, even though you won’t find all the answers in the text. Feel free to search online if you’re curious about more details about a question or an answer.

Next, you’ll make your quiz application easier to use by adding answer alternatives for each question.

Provide Multiple Choices

Using input() is a great way to read input from your user. However, the way you’re currently using it can end up being frustrating. For example, someone may answer one of your questions like this:

Should they really be marked wrong because they included the parentheses to indicate that the function is callable? You can take away a lot of guesswork for the users by giving them alternatives. For example:

Here, the alternatives show that you expect the answer to be entered without parentheses. In the example, the alternatives are listed before the question. This is a bit counterintuitive, but it’s easier to implement into your current code. You’ll improve this in the next step.

In order to implement answer alternatives, you need your data structure to be able to record three pieces of information for each question:

1. The question text
2. The correct answer
3. Answer alternatives

It’s time to revisit QUESTIONS for the first—but not the last—time and make some changes to it. It makes sense to store the answer alternatives in a list, as there can be any number of them and you just want to display them to the screen. Furthermore, you can treat the correct answer as one of the answer alternatives and include it in the list, as long as you’re able to retrieve it later.

You decide to change QUESTIONS to a dictionary where the keys are your questions and the values are the lists of answer alternatives. You consistently put the correct answer as the first item in the list of alternatives so that you can identify it.

Note: You could continue to use a list of two-tuples to hold your questions. In fact, you’re only iterating over the questions and answers, not looking up the answers by using a question as a key. Therefore, you could argue that the list of tuples is a better data structure for your use case than a dictionary.

However, you use a dictionary because it looks better visually in your code, and the roles of questions and answer alternatives are more distinct.

You update your code to loop over each item in your newly minted dictionary. For each question, you pick out the correct answer from the alternatives, and you print out all the alternatives before asking the question:

If you always showed the correct answer as the first alternative, then your users would soon catch on and be able to guess the correct answer every time. Instead, you change the order of the alternatives by sorting them. Test your application:

The last question reveals another experience that can be frustrating for the user. In this example, they’ve chosen the correct alternative. However, as they were typing it, a typo snuck in. Can you make your application more forgiving?

You know that the user will answer with one of the alternatives, so you just need a way for them to communicate which alternative they choose. You can add a label to each alternative and only ask the user to enter the label.

Update the application to use enumerate() to print the index of each answer alternative:

You store the reordered alternatives as sorted_alternatives so that you can look up the full answer based on the answer label that the user enters. Recall that input() always returns a string, so you need to convert it to an integer before you treat it as a list index.

Now, it’s more convenient to answer the questions:

Great! You’ve created quite a capable quiz application! In the next step, you won’t add any more functionality. Instead, you’ll make your application more user-friendly.

Step 2: Make Your Application User-Friendly

In this second step, you’ll improve on your quiz application to make it easier to use. In particular, you’ll improve the following:

• How the application looks and feels
• How you summarize the user’s results
• What happens if your user enters a nonexistent alternative
• Which order you present the questions and alternatives in

At the end of this step, your application will work as follows:

Your program will still work similarly to now, but it’ll be more robust and attractive. You can find the source code as it’ll look at the end of this step in the source_code_step_2 directory by clicking below:

Get Source Code: Click here to get access to the source code that you’ll use to build your quiz application.

Format the Output More Nicely

Look back at how your quiz application is currently presented. It’s not very attractive. There are no blank lines that tell you where a new question starts, and the alternatives are listed above the question, which is a bit confusing. Furthermore, the numbering of the different choices start at 0 instead of 1 , which would be more natural.

In your next update to quiz.py , you’ll number the questions themselves and present the question text above the answer alternatives. Additionally, you’ll use lowercase letters instead of numbers to identify answers:

You use string.ascii_lowercase to get letters that label your answer alternatives. You combine letters and alternatives with zip() and store them in a dictionary as follows:

You use these labeled alternatives when you display the options to the user and when you look up the user’s answer based on the label that they entered. Note the use of the special escape string «\n» . This is interpreted as a newline and adds a blank line on the screen. This is a simple way to add some organization to your output:

Your output is still mostly monochrome in the terminal, but it’s more visually pleasing, and it’s easier to read.

Keep Score

Now that you’re numbering the questions, it would also be nice to keep track of how many questions the user answers correctly. You can add a variable, num_correct , to take care of this:

You increase num_correct for each correct answer. The num loop variable already counts the total number of questions, so you can use that to report the user’s result.

Handle User Errors

So far, you haven’t worried too much about what happens if the user enters an answer that’s not valid. In the different versions of your app, this oversight could result in the program raising an error or—less dramatically—registering a user’s invalid answer as wrong.

You can handle user errors in a better way by allowing the user to re-enter their answer when they enter something invalid. One way to do this is to wrap input() in a while loop:

The condition (text := input()) != «quit» does a few things at once. It uses an assigment expression ( := ), often called the walrus operator, to store the user input as text and compare it to the string «quit» . The while loop will run until you type quit at the prompt. See The Walrus Operator: Python 3.8 Assignment Expressions for more examples.

Note: If you’re using an older version of Python than 3.8, then the assignment expression will cause a syntax error. You can rewrite the code to avoid using the walrus operator. There’s a version of the quiz application that runs on Python 3.7 in the source code that you downloaded earlier.

In your quiz application, you use a similar construct to loop until the user gives a valid answer:

If you enter an invalid choice at the prompt, then you’ll be reminded about your valid choices:

Note that once the while loops exits, you’re guaranteed that answer_label is one of the keys in labeled_alternatives , so it’s safe to look up answer directly. Next, you’ll add one more improvement by injecting some randomness into your quiz.

Add Variety to Your Quiz

Currently, when you run your quiz application, you’re always asking the questions in the same order as they’re listed in your source code. Additionally, the answer alternatives for a given question also come in a fixed order that never changes.

You can add some variety to your quiz by changing things up a little. You can randomize both the order of the questions and the order of the answer alternatives for each question:

You use random.sample() to randomize the order of your questions and the order of the answer alternatives. Usually, random.sample() picks out a few random samples from a collection. However, if you ask for as many samples as there are items in the sequence, then you’re effectively randomly reordering the whole sequence:

Additionally, you cap the number of questions in the quiz to NUM_QUESTIONS_PER_QUIZ which is initially set to five. If you include more than five questions in your application, then this also adds some variety as to which questions get asked in addition to the order in which they’re asked.

Note: You can also use random.shuffle() to shuffle your questions and alternatives. The difference is that shuffle() reorders sequences in place, which means that it changes your underlying QUESTIONS data structure. sample() creates new lists of questions and alternatives, instead.

In your current code, using shuffle() wouldn’t be a problem because QUESTIONS is reset every time you run your quiz application. It could become a problem down the line, for example if you implement the possibility of asking the same question several times. Your code is usually simpler to reason about if you don’t change or mutate your underlying data structure.

Throughout this step, you’ve improved on your quiz application. It’s now time to take a step back and consider the code itself. In the next section, you’ll reorganize the code so that you keep it modular and ready for further development.

Step 3: Organize Your Code With Functions

In this step, you’ll refactor your code. Refactoring means that you’ll change your code, but your application’s behavior and your user’s experience will stay as they are. This may not sound very exciting, but it’ll be tremendously useful down the line, as good refactorings make it more convenient to maintain and expand your code.

Note: If you’d like to see two Real Python team members work through refactoring some code, then check out Refactoring: Prepare Your Code to Get Help. You’ll also learn how to ask clear, concise programming questions.

Currently, your code isn’t particularly organized. All your statements are fairly low level. You’ll define functions to improve your code. A few of their advantages are the following:

• Functions name higher-level operations that can help you get an overview of your code.
• Functions can be reused.

To see how the code will look after you’ve refactored it, click below and check out the source_code_step_3 folder:

Get Source Code: Click here to get access to the source code that you’ll use to build your quiz application.

Prepare Data

Many games and applications follow a common life cycle:

1. Preprocess: Prepare initial data.
2. Process: Run main loop.
3. Postprocess: Clean up and close application.

In your quiz application, you first read the available questions, then you ask each of the questions, before finally reporting the final score. If you look back at your current code, then you’ll see these three steps in the code. But the organization is still a bit hidden within all the details.

You can make the main functionality clearer by encapsulating it in a function. You don’t need to update your quiz.py file yet, but note that you can translate the previous paragraph into code that looks like this:

This code won’t run as it is. The functions prepare_questions() and ask_question() haven’t been defined, and there are some other details missing. Still, run_quiz() encapsulates the functionality of your application at a high level.

Writing down your application flow at a high level like this can be a great start to uncover which functions are natural building blocks in your code. In the rest of this section, you’ll fill in the missing details:

• Implement prepare_questions() .
• Implement ask_question() .
• Revisit run_quiz() .

You’re now going to make quite substantial changes to the code of your quiz application as you’re refactoring it to use functions. Before doing so, it’s a good idea to make sure you can revert to the current state, which you know works. You can do this either by saving a copy of your code with a different filename or by making a commit if you’re using a version control system.

Once you’ve safely stored your current code, start with a new quiz.py that only contains your imports and global variables. You can copy these from your previous version:

Remember that you’re only reorganizing your code. You’re not adding new functionality, so you won’t need to import any new libraries.

Next, you’ll implement the necessary preprocessing. In this case, this means that you’ll prepare the QUESTIONS data structure so that it’s ready to be used in your main loop. For now, you’ll potentially limit the number of questions and make sure they’re listed in a random order:

Note that prepare_questions() deals with general questions and num_questions parameters. Afterward, you’ll pass in your specific QUESTIONS and NUM_QUESTIONS_PER_QUIZ as arguments. This means that prepare_questions() doesn’t depend on your global variables. With this decoupling, your function is more general, and you can later more readily replace the source of your questions.

Ask Questions

Look back on your sketch for the run_quiz() function and remember that it contains your main loop. For each question, you’ll call ask_question() . Your next task is to implement that helper function.

Think about what ask_question() needs to do:

1. Pick out the correct answer from the list of alternatives
2. Shuffle the alternatives
3. Print the question to the screen
4. Print all alternatives to the screen
5. Get the answer from the user
6. Check that the user’s answer is valid
7. Check whether the user answered correctly or not
8. Add 1 to the count of correct answers if the answer is correct

These are a lot of small things to do in one function, and you could consider whether there’s potential for further modularization. For example, items 3 to 6 in the list above are all about interacting with the user, and you can pull them into yet another helper function.

To achieve this modularization, add the following get_answer() helper function to your source code:

This function accepts a question text and a list of alternatives. You then use the same techniques as earlier to label the alternatives and ask the user to enter a valid label. Finally, you return the user’s answer.

Using get_answer() simplifies your implementation of ask_question() , as you no longer need to handle the user interaction. You can do something like the following:

You first randomly reorder the answer alternatives using random.shuffle() , as you did earlier. Next, you call get_answer() , which handles all details about getting an answer from the user. You can therefore finish up ask_question() by checking the correctness of the answer. Observe that you return 1 or 0 , which indicates to the calling function whether the answer was correct or not.

Note: You could replace the return values with Booleans. Instead of 1 , you could return True , and instead of 0 , you could return False . This would work because Python treats Booleans as integers in calculations:

In some cases, your code reads more naturally when you use True and False . In this case, you’re counting correct answers, so it seems more intuitive to use numbers.

You’re now ready to implement run_quiz() properly. One thing you’ve learned while implementing prepare_questions() and ask_question() is which arguments you need to pass on:

As earlier, you use enumerate() to keep a counter that numbers the questions you ask. You can increment num_correct based on the return value of ask_question() . Observe that run_quiz() is your only function that directly interacts with QUESTIONS and NUM_QUESTIONS_PER_QUIZ .

Your refactoring is now complete, except for one thing. If you run quiz.py now, then it’ll seem like nothing happens. In fact, Python will read your global variables and define your functions. However, you’re not calling any of those functions. You therefore need to add a function call that starts your application:

You call run_quiz() at the end of quiz.py , outside of any function. It’s good practice to protect such a call to your main function with an if __name__ == «__main__» test. This special incantation is a Python convention that means that run_quiz() is called when you run quiz.py as a script, but it’s not called when you import quiz as a module.

That’s it! You’ve refactored your code into several functions. This will help you in keeping track of the functionality of your application. It’ll also be useful in this tutorial, as you can consider changes to individual functions instead of changing the whole script.

For the rest of the tutorial, you’ll see your full code listed in collapsible boxes like the one below. Expand these to see the current state and get an overview of your full application:

quiz.py source code Show/Hide

The full source code of your quiz application is listed below:

Run your application with python quiz.py .

Through this step, you’ve refactored your code to make it more convenient to work with. You separated your commands into well-organized functions that you can continue to develop. In the next step, you’ll take advantage of this by improving how you read questions into your application.

Step 4: Separate Data Into Its Own File

You’ll continue your refactoring journey in this step. Your focus will now be how you provide questions to your application.

So far, you’ve stored the questions directly in your source code in the QUESTIONS data structure. It’s usually better to separate your data from your code. This separation can make your code more readable, but more importantly, you can take advantage of systems designed for handling data if it’s not hidden inside your code.

In this section, you’ll learn how to store your questions in a separate data file formatted according to the TOML standard. Other options—that you won’t cover in this tutorial—are storing the questions in a different file format like JSON or YAML, or storing them in a database, either a traditional relational one or a NoSQL database.

To peek at how you’ll improve your code in this step, click below and go to the source_code_step_4 directory:

Get Source Code: Click here to get access to the source code that you’ll use to build your quiz application.

Move Questions to a TOML File

TOML is branded as “a config file format for humans” (Source). It’s designed to be readable by humans and uncomplicated to parse by computers. Information is represented in key-value pairs that can be mapped to a hash table data structure, like a Python dictionary.

TOML supports several data types, including strings, integers, floating-point numbers, Booleans, and dates. Additionally, data can be structured in arrays and tables, which are similar to Python’s lists and dictionaries, respectively. TOML has been gaining popularity over the last years, and the format is stable after version 1.0.0 of the format specification was released in January 2021.

Create a new text file that you’ll call questions.toml , and add the following content:

While there are differences between TOML syntax and Python syntax, you’ll recognize elements like using quotation marks ( » ) for text and square brackets ( [] ) for lists of elements.

To work with TOML files in Python, you need a library that parses them. In this tutorial, you’ll use tomli . This will be the only package you use in this project that’s not part of Python’s standard library.

Note: TOML support is added to Python’s standard library in Python 3.11. If you’re already using Python 3.11, then you can skip the instructions below to create a virtual environment and install tomli . Instead, you can immediately start coding by replacing any mentions of tomli in your code with the compatible tomllib .

Later in this section, you’ll learn how to write code that can use tomllib if it’s available and fall back to tomli if necessary.

Before installing tomli , you should create and activate a virtual environment: