Mailroom With Dicts

Incorporate dictionary use.

Use dicts where appropriate.

The first version of this assignment used these basic data types: numbers, strings, lists and tuples.

However, using dictionaries, an important built in data structure in Python, will let you re-write your program a bit more simply and efficiently.

Update your mailroom program to:

• Convert your main donor data structure to be a dict. Think about an appropriate key for easy donor look up.

• Use dicts anywhere else, as appropriate.

• Use a dict to switch between the users selections. see Using a Dictionary to switch for what this means.

• Use a dict and the .format() method to produce the letter as one big template, rather than building up a big string that produces the letter in parts.

Example:

In [3]: d
Out[3]: {'first_name': 'Chris', 'last_name': 'Barker'}


In [5]: "My name is {first_name} {last_name}".format(**d)
Out[5]: 'My name is Chris Barker'

Don’t worry too much about the **. We’ll get into the details later, but for now it means, more or less, “pass this whole dict in as a bunch of keyword arguments.”