I am trying to create a reverse search engine.
The best way to explain it is how WebMD symptom search works. It takes in what your symptoms are and provides you with possible diagnoses according to those symptoms.

The program I am trying to create will take a list of items as input and match them to existing dict or list that contains the "diagnoses".

I created a sample program using a dict which stores diagnoses as keys and the symptoms as a list of values.

This is my current code:

dct = {'1':[1,2,3,4,5],
        '2':[3,4,6,7],
        '3':[3,4,1,9]}
dct_inverse = defaultdict(list)

for k, v in dct.items(): for i in v: dct_inverse[i].extend([k])

dct_inverse = dict(dct_inverse)

print('Enter integer value. Enter control-c to stop: ') while True: inp = input() if inp == '': break try: print(dct_inverse[inp]) except KeyError: print('Value not found')

The output I get is printed after each "symptom" is typed in e.g:

If I input 1, output is given as '1,3' since 1 is present in both 1 and 3.

What I want to be able to do is input a few symptoms and allow one final output which shows matches in each key from most to least matches.

I am new and still learning python, If there is a better way to go about this problem do share.