Troubleshooting simple script and printing class objects

[knackwurstbagel]

To answer your question #3 in reguards to your latest post (#7) I would made a loop
that inputs each value from the user into some temperary variable and then use that
to populate the citizen256032 instance. Here is some code I wrote that works
but leaves alot of room for improvement.

def main():
    # citizen256032 = PassPort('Jon', 'Ross', 'Dobbs', 'male', 1947, 44)
    # first, middle, last, gender, yob, iq
    # initalize a list with the default values, inputs will replace these
    person = ['Jon','Ross','Dobbs','male',1947,44]

    EOF = False;  #End of File, I use this as a flag to stop the while loop

    while not EOF:
        person[0] = input('First Name:')
        while not person[0].isalpha(): # Keep asking if input contains anything other than letters
            print('Please enter a valid first name')
            person[0] = input('First Name:')
        person[1] = input('Middle Name:')
        while not person[1].isalpha():
            print('Please enter a valid middle name')
            person[1] = input('Middle Name:')
        person[2] = input('Last Name:')
        while not person[2].isalpha():
            print('Please enter a valid last name')
            person[2] = input('Last Name:')
        print('Please select your gender\n')
        person[3] = int(input('\t0) Female\n\t1) Male\n'))
        while (person[3] not in range(0,2)):
            print('Please enter a value of either 0 or 1')
            person[3] = int(input('\t0) Female\n\t1) Male\n'))
        person[4] = int(input('What year were you born? (nnnn): '))
        while (person[4] not in range(1800,2999)):
            print('Please enter a four digit number')
            person[4] = int(input('What year were you born? (nnnn): '))
        person[5] = int(input('What is your IQ?: '))
        while (person[5] not in range(0,160)):
            print('Please enter a number between 0 and 160 inclusive')
            person[5] = int(input('What is your IQ? (0-160): '))
        EOF = True;

    if (person[3] == 0):
        gender = 'male'
    else:
        gender = 'female'

    citizen256032 = PassPort(person[0],person[1], person[2], gender, person[4], person[5])
    print(citizen256032)

Here is my explanation of what I have done

EOF is just what I use to mark the end of the while loop, so after all input is gathered I mark EOF as false thus causing the while loop to break.

person is a list which I populated with default values, that once the user enters their
values, gets replaced with the users repsonce. Its sole purpose is to store the data while it is being collected

I get input for each value and then each time I sanitize the input from the user to verify that it meets the basic expectations, for example a name should not contain numbers and a year of birth should not be a string. In this case isalpha() will return true if the value given contains only letters, but I want to know if the user did NOT enter a purely alphabetic string in such case I want to continue looping for input untill the condition fails, which in this case means they did enter what was expected

to force person[3], person[4] and person[5] values to be integers, I enclose the input inside int(). I then test these using a contriversal method wherre range returns a list of values in that range which are then checked against the input. This can be considered slow and it is probably faster to use something like (0 <= person[5] <= 160) to check if the value is within range.

Because I gather 1 for male and 0 for female, and your object requires a string, I use the finaly if else block to create a gender variable which is the expected string

I hope this makes some sence

Like I said there are probably better ways to do this, for example I could have written a function that does the job of asking for input untill a user enters all letters, instead of rewriting that code over and over again. Also this is aproaching database teritory where books on the subject of coding such a database in various languages have been written. In this case the user input is thrown into memory which is then not accessable after the script ends.

Hope this helped somewhat.