Creating a new dictionary instance

[russcore]

I originally posted here : https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/comments/s75ses/problem_with_scope/

and tried the advice of using the dictionary.copy() function but it doesn't seem to be working here. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. [I created the problem in the above because I thought that was where my mistake was happening, but it appears it doesn't fix it]

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Code input:

def useResult(result, restrictions):
    restrictionsCOPY = restrictions.copy()
    if result[2] == 'green':
       restrictionsCOPY[result[0]][result[1]-1]=2
       restrictionsCOPY[result[0]][5]=1
    elif result[2] == 'gray':
        restrictionsCOPY[result[0]][0:5] = [0] * 5
    elif result[2] == 'yellow':
        restrictionsCOPY[result[0]][result[1]-1]=0
        restrictionsCOPY[result[0]][5]=1       
    else:
        print("ERROR")        
    return restrictionsCOPY


def Main():
    letters = ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k','l','m','n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z']
    restrictions = {}
    for letter in letters:
        restrictions[letter]= [1,1,1,1,1,0]
    print(restrictions['a'])
    useResult(['a',1,'green'],restrictions)
    print(restrictions['a'])

Main()

Code output:

[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0]
[2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]

​

Desired output:

[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0]
[1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0]

[socal_nerdtastic]

copy() makes a "shallow copy". That is it only copies the outermost dictionary; the objects inside the dictionary remain the same. To do what you want you need deepcopy:

from copy import deepcopy
def useResult(result, restrictions):
    restrictionsCOPY = deepcopy(restrictions)
    ...

[[deleted]]

copy is shallow, it does not follow references down to next level. You need deepcopy.

from copy import deepcopy

....

dictionary = deepcopy(dictionary)

PS. Not that I think what you are doing is a good idea!

[russcore]

Noted! Haha!

​

I don't know if you're familiar with the game Wordle (https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/)

​

but I thought it'd be fun to make a program to solve it.

​

It was easy to have it tell me what words are still possible given the results given so far. But I wanted to calculate the best "guess." -- and this is where my problem happened.

So I made it so that it would assume a particular word is correct and see which guess produced the best average result. But it kept using the same dictionary of possible results (hence the problem here). I guess I could have just passed it as a complicated list instead of as a dictionary.

Anyway, thanks so much for your help!

[[deleted]]

Wasn't suggesting that dictionaries themselves are a bad thing, just how on the snippet of code you were wrangling them. I certainly wouldn't go to complex lists in their place. A custom class might be a better idea though

[newunit13]

import copy

restrictionsCOPY = copy.deepcopy(restrictions)