Python Disambiguation

Question

I am currently building a MUD (Multi-User-Domain) for an rpg game. Doing this entirely in Python to both make a game I enjoy, and learn python. A problem I am running in to, and due to the extreme specificity of the question, I've been unable to find the right answer.

So, here's what I need, in a nut-shell. I don't have a good snippet of code that fully shows what I need as I'd have to paste about 50 lines to have to 5 lines I'm using make sense.

targetOptions = ['Joe', 'Bob', 'zombie', 'Susan', 'kobold', 'Bill']

A cmd in our game is attack, where we type 'a zombie' and we then proceed to kill the zombie. However, I want to just type 'a z'. We've tried a few different things in our code, but they're all unstable and often just wrong. One of our attempts returned something like ['sword', 'talisman'] as matches for 'get sword'. So, is there a way to search this list and have it return a matched value?

I also need to just return value[0] if there are say, 2 zombies in the room and I type 'a z'. Thanks for all your help ahead of time, and I hope I was clear enough for what I'm looking for. Please let me know if more info is needed. And don't worry about the whole attacking thing, I just need to send 'zo' and get 'zombie' or something similar. Thanks!

Try posting some of your failed attempts. It would be easier for us to fix that than to do your assignment for you — inspectorG4dget, Jul 04 '12 at 23:09

Filip Dupanović · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-05T22:09:37.703

Welcome to SO and Python! I suggest you take a look at the official Python documentation and spend some time looking around what's included in the Python Standard Library.

The difflib module contains a function get_close_matches() that can help you with approximate string comparisons. Here's how it looks like:

from difflib import get_close_matches

def get_target_match(target, targets):
    '''
    Approximates a match for a target from a sequence of targets,
    if a match exists.
    '''
    source, targets = targets, map(str.lower, targets)
    target = target.lower()

    matches = get_close_matches(target, targets, n=1, cutoff=0.25)

    if matches:
        match = matches[0]
        return source[targets.index(match)]
    else:
        return None

target = 'Z'
targets = ['Joe', 'Bob', 'zombie', 'Susan', 'kobold', 'Bill']
match = get_target_match(target, targets)
print "Going nom on %s" % match # IT'S A ZOMBIE!!!

edit: it appears to be, according to documentation examples, that this is for something along the lines of spelling correction. I can give appel and have apple returned. Z will not match zombie in this case. Anything less than 3 characters returns None as well. 'j' and 'jo' do not return 'Joe'. — jtsmith1287, Jul 05 '12 at 21:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 04 '12 at 23:10

>>> filter(lambda x: x.startswith("z"), ['Joe', 'Bob', 'zombie', 'Susan', 'kobold', 'Bill'])
['zombie']
>>> cmd = "a zom"
>>> cmd.split()
['a', 'zom']
>>> cmd.split()[1]
'zom'
>>> filter(lambda x: x.startswith(cmd.split()[1]), ['Joe', 'Bob', 'zombie', 'Susan', 'kobold', 'Bill'])
['zombie']

does that help?

filter filters a list (2nd arg) for things that the 1st arg accepts. cmd is your command and cmd.split()[1] gets the part after the space. lambda x: x.startswith(cmd.split()[1]) is a function (a lambda expression) that asks "does x start with the command after the space?"

for another test, if cmd is "a B" then there are two matches:

>>> cmd = "a B"
>>> filter(lambda x: x.startswith(cmd.split()[1]), ['Joe', 'Bob', 'zombie', 'Susan', 'kobold', 'Bill'])
['Bob', 'Bill']

Python Disambiguation

2 Answers2