Find 'greater than' items in list

[johneven]

rainfall_mi is a string that contains the average number of inches of rainfall in Michigan for every month (in inches) with every month separated by a comma. Write code to compute the number of months that have more than 3 inches of rainfall. Store the result in the variable num_rainy_months. In other words, count the number of items with values > 3.0.

#given string
rainfall_mi = "1.65, 1.46, 2.05, 3.03, 3.35, 3.46, 2.83, 3.23, 3.5, 2.52, 2.8, 1.85"

#my attempt
items = rainfall_mi.split(",")
#print (items)
accum = 0
for inches in items:
    if inches > 3.0:
        accum = accum + 1
num_rainy_months = accum
print(num_rainy_months)

Output:
12 
(should be 5)

[Yoriz]

You need to turn the value inches into a number, at the moment it is comparing a string to a float in the line if inches > 3.0:
convert using float

[perfringo]

In addition to Yoriz suggestion some additional ideas.

You can shorten you code (you don't need accum, you can collect result directly into num_rainy_months; you don't need to assign name to .split(',') result you can iterate over it directly, you can use +=)

rainfall_mi = "1.65, 1.46, 2.05, 3.03, 3.35, 3.46, 2.83, 3.23, 3.5, 2.52, 2.8, 1.85"
num_rainy_months = 0
for inches in rainfall_mi.split(','):
    if float(inches) > 3.0:
        num_rainy_months += 1
print(num_rainy_months)
5

As always in programming there are several ways to achieve desired result. Code above is easy to turn into list comprehension or generator.

Generator expression returns 1 for every value in list which is larger than 3.0 and sum() sums them up:

rainfall_mi = "1.65, 1.46, 2.05, 3.03, 3.35, 3.46, 2.83, 3.23, 3.5, 2.52, 2.8, 1.85"
num_rainy_months = sum(1 for inches in rainfall_mi.split(',') if float(inches) > 3.0)

List comprehension returns elements which are larger than 3.0 and using len() we get number of months (we can't use len() on generators because they don't have length):

num_rainy_months = len([inches for inches in rainfall_mi.split(',') if float(inches) > 3.0])

There is also built-in function filter(). Introduction of comprehensions made it more or less 'obsolete', but it doesn't mean that one should not know about it. Filter requires functions, below filter object is converted to list just to show the result of filtering:

>>> list(filter(lambda inches: float(inches) > 3.0, rainfall_mi.split(',')))
[' 3.03', ' 3.35', ' 3.46', ' 3.23', ' 3.5']