Lists, second part

Before You Begin

For this exercise (and some of the following exercises), you will need an additional resource: the pyflix package

Overview

We are going to launch a video streaming service, PyFlix, similar to Netflix but written in Python. We will therefore be managing a catalog.

The pyflix.datasource module contains a function named get_season() that returns the list of episode titles for season 12 of "The Big Bang Theory". We’re going to extract information from this list.

The easiest way to use this function is as follow:

import pyflix.datasource as ds

ds.get_season()

To use this function, you can consult the dedicated page on the wiki

Create a reference to the data

Assign the return value of this function to a variable named bbt_s12. This is the reference to the season loaded into memory in your module.

We will use this variable for the following questions (you should not call the function again to avoid overloading the server). The following questions are independent of one another.

Tip: Displaying collections

To display the collection, you’ll see that the print() function isn’t suitable. It displays the list’s contents on a single line, which isn’t practical for viewing its contents. To view the list’s contents, I suggest using the pprint() function from the pprint module:

from pprint import pprint

pprint(bbt_s12)

This function has a name that won’t conflict with the print() function, so you can import it directly.

Calculate the season’s duration

Assuming each episode lasts 23 minutes, how long is the season?

To do this, write a function that takes (at least) a list of episodes as an argument and returns the duration of that list of episodes.

Manage your evening playlist

We want to obtain a list of the first episodes whose total duration is less than or equal to a given duration.

To do this, you must create a function with (at least) a list of episodes (ep_list) and the maximum duration (max_duration). This function must return the list of the first N episodes from ep_list, where N is the maximum number of episodes to watch. N is a maximum.

Note: ep_list and max_duration are used here to reference the data; you can use more appropriate names as parameters.

Use this function with bbt_s12 as the argument and a duration of 2 hours.

The User Playlist

Users want to track their progress through a series, so we'll handle this using a playlist that is a copy of the season. The next episode to watch is the first one in the playlist. Once it's been watched, it's removed from the playlist.

Create a copy of the Season 12 list (bbt_s12) in a variable playlist (it doesn’t matter if the name was already used for the previous list).

To simulate watching an episode (the first one in the playlist), simply display its title. At the same time, remove it from the playlist. You can, of course, use a function for this, a function that takes a list of episodes as an argument.

The playlist contains only the episodes left to watch (currently one fewer than the complete series). Use the function that calculates the duration to display the duration of the remaining episodes and the complete season to compare the two values.

What do you notice?