Tutorial 5

234128 – Introduction to
Computing with Python

Written and edited by Bronislav Demin

Today
• While Loop
• Strings
• Lists
• Lists and Strings

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WHILE LOOP

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While Loop
• While loop structure:

expression
While False
block
True
Statements

• As long as the expression evaluates to True, the following

indented statements will be executed.
• When the expression evaluates to False, continue with the
code following the while block.
• It is possible for indented statements to not be evaluated
at all if the expression is False right from the start.
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Example: Get Positive Number

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Fibonacci Numbers
• 𝐹0 = 1
• 𝐹1 = 1 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55,…
• 𝐹𝑛 = 𝐹𝑛−2 + 𝐹𝑛−1

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Fibonacci Numbers: Code

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East Gate Restaurants Competition
• A survey of East Gate restaurants
is taking place in GTIIT.

• Write a program that collects

student votes.

• The program will count the votes

and declare what is the best
restaurant in East Gate!

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East Gate Restaurants Competition
• Three restaurants are participating in the survey:
1. Old Number 4 老四小炒 (vote ‘1’ or ‘n4’)
2. GuoTiaoHenXi 粿条很细 (vote ‘2’ or ‘gt’)
3. RuanGuoGuo Dumpling 阮锅锅饺子 (vote ‘3’ or ‘gg’)

• Each vote is accepted by submitting the corresponding string.

• Voting stops when an empty string is received as input.

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East Gate Restaurants Competition

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East Gate Restaurants Competition

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East Gate Restaurants Competition

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CONTINUE, BREAK

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Continue/Break Flowchart
• Break - exits the loop block
completely and stops
evaluating the expression. False
expression
• Continue - stops only the
True
current iteration and goes
continue statement break
back to evaluate the
expression.

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Continue - Example
• Read N integer numbers from the
user.
• Sum up only positive numbers.
Negative
number?
Skip to
the next
iteration!
• If a number is negative or zero, the
sum will not be updated!

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Break - Example
• Read N integer numbers from the
user.
• Sum up only positive numbers.
• If at any point a negative number is
given, exit the while loop completely.

Negative
number?
Stop
looping!
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Exercise 3 – Count Digits in Number
• Write a program which gets a number x and digit d as input.
• The program finds how many times the digit d appear in number
x.
• You may assume all the numbers are positive.

• Examples:
- The digit 1 appears two times in 215610
- The digit 0 appears one time in 10

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Exercise 3 – Count Digits: Code

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STRINGS

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Strings
• Thus far, we learned how to assign strings: x = ‘Hello’
• And concatenate strings: ‘bye’ + ‘bye’ → ‘byebye’
• Return length of a string: len(‘byebye’) → 6

• Strings also support indexing (positive and negative):

‘H’ ‘e’ ‘l’ ‘l’ ‘o’ ‘ ‘ ‘W’ ‘o’ ‘r’ ‘l’ ‘d’
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
-11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1
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Strings
• To get a character in a specific location
inside a string, we use an index inside
square brackets:

• If the index is outside the

length of the string, we get
an Index Error:

Same with negative indices!

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LISTS

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Lists
• Lists in Python are ordered collections of items.
• To create a list, we use square brackets:

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Lists
• A list can be empty or include a whole variety of
different objects:

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Lists - Indexing
• Like strings, we can
access specific values
using indices:

• Invalid indices result

in an Index Error:

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List Initialization
• We can create a simple list:

• How about a list of certain length?

• Empty list?

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Lists: in Operator
• Using the in operator, we can check existence inside a list:

True if user
entered ‘y’ or ‘n’

Equivalent to:
if x==‘n’ or x==‘y’

False if user entered

anything which is
not ‘y’ and ‘n’
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List – Common Use Cases
When do we need a list?
1. Calculate average or median of heights
2. Find min or max in a collection of numbers
3. Keeping track of multiple items that share similar
properties.
The items can be numbers, characters, strings, dates,
words, images, etc.

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LISTS AND STRINGS

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Lists and Strings
String List
Immutable – cannot be Mutable – can be changed
changed and modified

Each item in the string is a Each item can be anything,

character of size 1 even a list (nested list)
Length can be given using Length can be given using
len() function len() function

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String Methods
• Split: Converts String → List >>> sentence = 'You cannot end a
sentence with because because because
is a conjunction.'

my_string.split(separator) >>> sentence.split(' ')

['You', 'cannot', 'end', 'a',
'sentence', 'with', 'because',
string string 'because', 'because', 'is', 'a',
'conjunction.']
• separator – any character or >>> sentence.split('')

string (Empty string – behaves like Traceback (most recent call last):

space ‘ ‘ separator). File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

ValueError: empty separator
• Very useful when getting input. >>> sentence.split(‘because')

• Split: Sentence → Words ['You cannot end a sentence with ', '
', ' ', ' is a conjunction.']

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String Methods
• Join: Converts List to String >>> band_list = ['The
Beatles', 'Led Zeppelin', 'The
Rolling Stones', 'Pink Floyd',
separator.join(my_list) 'Queen']
>>> ';'.join(band_list)
string list
'The Beatles;Led Zeppelin;The
Rolling Stones;Pink
• separator – any character or Floyd;Queen'
string.
>>> ''.join(band_list)
'The BeatlesLed ZeppelinThe
Rolling StonesPink FloydQueen'

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Encryption
• Write a program which encrypts a string in such
a way that each character will become its
successor.

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Encryption - Code
• Write a program which encrypts a string in such a way that each
character will become its successor.

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