hackerrank day 8 python

Question

SPOILER This questions is about the Hackerrank Day 8 challenge, in case you want to try it yourself first.

This is the question they give:

Given n names and phone numbers, assemble a phone book that maps friends' names to their respective phone numbers. You will then be given an unknown number of names to query your phone book for. For each name queried, print the associated entry from your phone book on a new line in the form name=phoneNumber; if an entry for is not found, print Not found instead.

Note: Your phone book should be a Dictionary/Map/HashMap data structure.

The first line contains an integer, n, denoting the number of entries in the phone book. Each of the n subsequent lines describes an entry in the form of 2 space-separated values on a single line. The first value is a friend's name, and the second value is an 8-digit phone number.

After the n lines of phone book entries, there are an unknown number of lines of queries. Each line (query) contains name a to look up, and you must continue reading lines until there is no more input.

Note: Names consist of lowercase English alphabetic letters and are first names only.

They go further then to give the input:

3
sam 99912222
tom 11122222
harry 12299933
sam
edward
harry

which expects the output:

sam=99912222
Not found
harry=12299933

I am having trouble with the unknown number of names to query. I tried using a try/except block to stop at an EOFError but I keep timing out on their test cases 1, 2 and 3. It works on two of the other test cases but not those and I assume it must be because I am stuck in a kind of infinite loop using my while True statement? This is what I wrote:

phonebook = {}
entries = int(raw_input())

for n in range(entries):
    name, num = raw_input().strip().split(' ')
    name, num = [str(name), int(num)]
    phonebook[name] = num

while True:
    try:  
        search = str(raw_input())

        if search in phonebook.keys():
            output = ''.join('%s=%r' % (search, phonebook[search]))
            print output
        else:
            print "Not found"
    except EOFError:
        break

I am still fairly new to python so maybe I'm not using the try/except or break methods correctly? I would appreciate if anyone could tell me where I went wrong or what I can do to improve my code?

Answer 1

The only mistake you are doing is that you are using

phonebook.keys()

You can loop without using .keys() . It will save time.

phonebook = {}
entries = int(raw_input())

for n in range(entries):
    name, num = raw_input().strip().split(' ')
    name, num = [str(name), int(num)]
    phonebook[name] = num

while True:
    try:  
        search = str(raw_input())

        if search in phonebook:
            output = ''.join('%s=%r' % (search, phonebook[search]))
            print output
        else:
            print "Not found"
    except EOFError:
        break

The above code will work with all the test cases.

Answer 2

In python-3

# n, Enter number of record you need to insert in dict
n = int(input())
d = dict()

# enter name and number by separate space
for i in range(0, n):
    name, number = input().split()
    d[name] = number
# print(d)      #print dict, if needed

# enter name in order to get phone number
for i in range(0, n):
    try:
        name = input()
        if name in d:
            print(f"{name}={d[name]}")
        else:
            print("Not found")
    except:
        break

Input:

3
sam 99912222
tom 11122222
harry 12299933
sam
edward
harry

Output:

sam=99912222
Not found
harry=12299933