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My program is a basic Tkinter game with a scoreboard type system. This system stores the username and the number of attempts each user has had in a text file.

For example, when it is the user's first time, it appends their name to the end of the text file as [joe_bloggs, 1] with joe_bloggs being the username and 1 being the number of attempts. As its the user's first time, it's 1.

I am trying to look for a way to 'update' or change the number '1' to increment by 1 each time. This text file stores all the users, i.e [Joe,1] [example1, 1] [example2, 2] in that format.

Here is the code I currently have: 

write = ("[", username, attempts ,"]") if (username not in filecontents): #Searches the file contents for the username with open("test.txt", "a") as Attempts: Attempts.write(write) print("written to file") else: print("already exists") #Here is where I want to have the mechanism to update the number.

Thanks in advance.

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  • @MYGz Currently, they're separated by a space. Thanks Commented Jan 15, 2017 at 11:03
  • For your use case Mike's solution is more appropriate. Commented Jan 15, 2017 at 11:17

2 Answers 2

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A simple solution would be using the shelve module of the standard library:

import shelve scores = shelve.open('scores') scores['joe_bloggs'] = 1 print(scores['joe_bloggs']) scores['joe_bloggs'] += 1 print(scores['joe_bloggs']) scores.close()

Output:

1 2

Next session:

scores = shelve.open('scores') print(scores['joe_bloggs'])

Output:

2

A “shelf” is a persistent, dictionary-like object. The difference with “dbm” databases is that the values (not the keys!) in a shelf can be essentially arbitrary Python objects — anything that the pickle module can handle. This includes most class instances, recursive data types, and objects containing lots of shared sub-objects. The keys are ordinary strings.

You can convert the whole content into a dictionary:

>>> dict(scores) {'joe_bloggs': 2}

Adapted to your use case:

username = 'joe_bloggs' with shelve.open('scores') as scores: if username in scores: scores[username] += 1 print("already exists") else: print("written to file") scores[username] = 1

If you don't always want to check if the user is already there, you can use a defaultdict. First, create the file:

from collections import defaultdict import shelve with shelve.open('scores', writeback=True) as scores: scores['scores'] = defaultdict(int)

Later, you just need to write scores['scores'][user] += 1:

username = 'joe_bloggs' with shelve.open('scores', writeback=True) as scores: scores['scores'][user] += 1

An example with multiple users and increments:

with shelve.open('scores', writeback=True) as scores: for user in ['joe_bloggs', 'user2']: for score in range(1, 4): scores['scores'][user] += 1 print(user, scores['scores'][user])

Output:

joe_bloggs 1 joe_bloggs 2 joe_bloggs 3 user2 1 user2 2 user2 3
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3 Comments

I see. How is it different than pickle?
It is (like a) a dictionary.
This solution is more simpler IMO.
0

You can use standard ConfigParser module to persist simple application states.

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