Exercise 1

The attributes of an employee are name, payroll number, job title and salary.

In the file ex1.py write a function which takes a string argument, and creates and returns a tuple containing details of the employee specified by the string. The string should be assumed to have the format

12345 25000 Consultant Bartholomew Homer Simpson

The first three items in the line will be the payroll number, salary and job title and the rest of the line will be the name. There will be no spaces in the job title but there will be spaces in the name. The tuple should contain exactly 5 items: the payroll number, salary, job title, surname and other names. (The other names should be stored as a single string; the surname will be the last name in the input line so in the example above the surname is Simpson and the other names are Bartholomew Homer. You should not assume that all employees will have exactly two other names; some may have just one and others may have more than two.)

Next, write a function that will print the details of an employee on a single output line. It should take a tuple as its argument and print the details in fixed-width fields using a layout such as
Simpson, Bartholomew Homer 12345 Consultant £25000

The name must be displayed in a single fixed-width fieldusing the format shown above so you will need to create a string containing the name in this format and print it in a fixed- width field. You may assume that no name will contain more than 30 characters when displayed in this format, no job title will contain more than 15 characters, payroll numbers will contain at most 5 digits and all salaries will be integers less than 1,000,000.

In the main body of the program, write code which prompts the user for a filename and attempts to open the file whose name is supplied. If the file cannot be opened an error message should be output and the program should terminate; otherwise the program should read each line from the file and supply it to the employee tuple-creation function, storing the tuples returned by this function in a list. You may assume that the file contains lines that conform to the format described for the argument to the function.

After the data has been input the program should display details of all the employees in the list in a neat table (using the function already written) then enter a loop in which the user should be given the option of requesting the display of (a) full details of (i) the employee with a given payroll number or (ii) all employees with a salary in a particular range (e.g. 20000 to 30000) or (b) the first and last names of all employees with a specified job title using the format Bartholomew Simpson (other names, when they exist, must not be output) or quitting the program. The user should then be asked to supply the job title, payroll number or lower and upper bounds of the salary range (as appropriate), the list should then be searched and the appropriate output displayed (using the function written earlier when full details are required). The salary output should be sorted numerically in ascending order of salary.. Appropriate messages should be displayed if a search produces no results. The user should be told what has to be typed in order to select each option; the input options should be concise (e.g. ‘1', ‘2' etc. or ‘j', ‘s' etc.) in order to allow quick testing of the program.

Exercise 2

This exercise involves writing a program to solve word search puzzles. For example in the following word grid it is possible to find the words active, stock, ethernet and java.

xmmycxvtljlqbbybkoumjqwbtbufve
buubmekxbeydqmcnzyjpvdankomdmi
lqactivexnyvwdvcoshoyrohgvfvqj
vsewohvnbxsduqjiffkoyhpdwbrngc
dvqwwwfkoyamapmlrrjvtkljpcvkua
iqqfxtumsjvfmtrsbycyqiarixqikp
afgrvlqzdqaxaoanfqplmjpjhnzams
yofywrbpfcjiflcbbcoecxpwljyuyt
twyxetyuyufvvmcuawjmbwlqhxjgqo
txekdexmdbtgvhpyvsqtmljdxeqltc
dcctenrehteoxqdgnueljtrrnesgok
oqsnakqwerouftmgnjqbytjzhmwncc

Inputting the Grid from a File

In the file ex2.py write code to prompt the user for a filename, and attempt to open the file whose name is supplied. If the file cannot be opened the user should be asked to supply another filename; this should continue until a file has been successfully opened.

The file will contain on each line a row from the grid. For example the first two lines of a file that contains the grid shown on the previous page would be

xmmycxvtljlqbbybkoumjqwbtbufve
buubmekxbeydqmcnzyjpvdackomdmi

Write code to read, in turn, each line of the file, remove the newline character and append the resulting string to a list of strings.

After the input is complete the strings in the list should be displayed on the screen, one per line.

Note that grids used for testing the submitted programs may have different widths and heights from the sample one that will be provided. Grids will contain only lower-case letters.

The Word-Search Function

Write a function that will take two arguments: a word to be searched for and a list of strings containing the grid.

The function should search for a horizontal (left-to-right or right-to-left) or vertical (downwards or upwards) occurrence of the. If a word occurs more than once the function is required to find only one occurrence so you should stop searching once the word has been found.

[ It is recommended that you first write a function that just searches for horizontal occurrences and then write the code for section 2.3 to allow the function to be tested before adding code to the function to search for vertical occurrences. ]

If the word has not been found None should be returned; if the word has been found the function should return a tuple, containing the row and column numbers of the first letter of the word and a string indicating the direction (i.e. four integers). The top row should be regarded as row 1 and the leftmost column as column 1.

The Word-Search

After displaying the grid, the program should ask the user to supply a name of a file containing words to be searched for, one word per line. This file should be opened, once again asking the user to supply another name if necessary. You should supply each word in this file in turn to the word-search function. If the function returns None the word should be added to a list of words that have not been found; otherwise the tuple returned should be added to a dict object using the word as a key.

After searching for all of the words you should display details of all of the words in the dictionary (in alphabetical order) using a format such as

active found: left to right from row 3 col 3

Finally you should output a list of the words that were not found (also in alphabetical order).

Documentation and Commenting
All functions in each of the programs should have documentation strings stating precisely what they do (but not how they do it), what their arguments are and what they return.

Within function bodies occasional brief comments, such as "search upwards" or "sort by surname" should be used to indicate what is being done by blocks of code - comments stating what each individual line does should not be provided.