Need help with coin change program

[perfringo]

It is always good idea to separate how from what. How to get coins quantity and what to do with these quantities.

How to get coins quantity? One needs to have quotient and reminder. There is function for that in Python: divmod(). Quotient is quantity of coins and reminder becomes new amount.

One can create function which iterates over coins values and assigns quantity to each coin value and returns dictionary (NB! dictionaries are insertion ordered from Python 3.6):

def coins(amount, coins=(50, 10, 5, 1)): 
    quantities = dict() 
    for coin in coins: 
        quantities[coin], amount = divmod(amount, coin) 
    return quantities 

What to do with coin quantities? Print out in any format you like? (below also requires 3.6 <= Python as f-strings are used):

>>> for k, v in coins(47).items(): 
...    print(f'{k} {"cents" if k > 1 else "cent"}: {v}') 
...
50 cents: 0
10 cents: 4
5 cents: 1
1 cent: 2

In Europe cents are in 50, 20, 10, 5, 2, 1 nomination. Function can be easily adjusted to reflect this:

>>> for k, v in coins(47, coins=(50, 20, 10, 5, 2, 1)).items(): 
...     print(f'{k} {"cents" if k > 1 else "cent"}: {v}') 
...                                                                       
50 cents: 0
20 cents: 2
10 cents: 0
5 cents: 1
2 cents: 1
1 cent: 0

Maybe print out only coins which have quantities:

>>> for k, v in coins(47, coins=(50, 20, 10, 5, 2, 1)).items(): 
...     if v: 
...         print(f'{k} {"cents" if k > 1 else "cent"}: {v}') 
...
20 cents: 2
5 cents: 1
2 cents: 1

I think that this way there is much more flexibility in what to do with result and how is somewhat abstracted away