Python Beginner Projects - State Capitals Look Up Function - Practice Programs Episode 2

hello and welcome back to the channel today's video is going to be episode 2 in a beginner projects with python series coming out of this channel and today we're going to create a state capital checker so we're going to create a lookup function that you type in a state and they'll the python code we write will spit out the capital of that state so let's go ahead and get started and the first thing you need to do when you have lookup functions if you're not looking something up from an external source like the internet or some kind of plug-in you have to create your dictionary of data so for us we're gonna have a dictionary that we call states and capitals and a dictionary remember goes inside these curly brackets and it's created with what's called key value pairs so the first thing you put in a dictionary is your key and in this case the state name is going to be the key and then the value that gets paired with it is going to be the montgomery is going to be the capital of that state and then you separate your values by a comma so the second one would be arizona and phoenix and i just did these first two here um so that you can see the format of a properly formatted dictionary it's key then value pairs with a colon in between the two and a comma separating key value pairs and this would be a really long and boring video if i made you guys watch me type in 50 states and their capitals so i have those typed out a little bit because i don't hate you guys that much and so if we go ahead and there we go alabama alaska arizona arkansas um so the indentation doesn't matter too much i know this looks kind of ugly but i don't want this to be a crazy long video so let's go ahead and get into the actual code we can just assume i correctly entered the data but now we have a dictionary that we're able to pull data from called states and capitals and the code is actually going to be pretty simple from here really all we need to do is get an input from a user so we'll say state is equal to input enter a state and then we'll go ahead and do print and let's say our text is going to be the capital of plus state plus is we're gonna need some spaces in here and remember you can use these plus signs to concatenate a string as long as everything in it is a string so we have a variable that we know is going to be a string as it gets entered then over here we have a string using single quotation marks and over here we have a string using double quotation marks this is all valid to just add together with the concatenate because we're still just adding strings together so then the last piece to this is going to be plus and now here's where we need to format so we'll do string and then we'll use the states and capitals dictionary that we created and we'll use a built-in python function for dictionaries called dot get and we will get whatever value is associated with the state that was entered or so the cool thing about the dot get function is you can also enter a value if it's not found in the dictionary so if it's not found in the dictionary what we want to say is state plus blank was not found in table so um that's really all we need to do for this lookup function and i'll go ahead and just run it a few times and we can see it's really pretty cool enter a state let's go ahead and check ohio uh that was is columbus might be nice to add a space after is let's go ahead and do new york i guess it's albany that's great okay now let's do one that we're not going to get let's do pete the capital of pete is pete was not found in the table so there's a lot of ways you can format the outputs i mean there are ways you could write this that would not be as silly as the capital of pete is pete was not found in the table but the point is with just a dictionary of info and prompting a user for a key we can look up the associated data with that key and we can handle exceptions for when that key is not found so this is a pretty cool little function and uh hopefully you found that useful and interesting this is a nice short project you can tackle and it's really useful to be able to look up data from data sets and dictionaries and tables and anything like that and it's all pretty much going to follow this same format so if you have done similar projects in a different way or you have any questions about what you saw today go ahead and let me know about it in the comments below otherwise if you found the content on this channel useful feel free to leave a like and subscribe i really appreciate that and as always i appreciate you watching the channel and good luck with your code thanks bye