Maths quiz with difficulty levels

Question

I've written this code but it's really long. I really need it to be shorter so can someone please help me! Any suggestions will be helpful.

choice=raw_input("What type of quiz do you want to do: maths or science? ") 
topic=open("topic.txt", "a+") 
topic.write(choice + '\n') 
topic.close() 
difficulty=raw_input("What difficulty do you want to play on: easy, medium or hard? ") 
diff=open("difficulty.txt", "a+") 
diff.write(difficulty + '\n') 
diff.close()
score = 0
def answercheck(score, str_answer, int_answer):
 user_answer=raw_input("Select your answer. ")
 if user_answer.upper() == str(str_answer) or user_answer.upper() == str(int_answer):
 print("Well done, that's correct")
 score+=1
 print("Your score is " +str(score))
 else:
 print ("Wrong, it was "+str(int_answer))
 print("Your score is " +str(score))
 raw_input("Press enter to continue")
 return score
def report(score):
 print("Your final score is "+str(score))
 per=str(score)*(100/5)
 print("You achieved "+per+"%")
 if score==5:
 print("You achieved an A*")
 elif score==4:
 print("You acieved a grade B")
 elif score==3:
 print("You achieved a grade C")
 elif score==2:
 print("You achieved a grade D")
 elif score<=1:
 print("You failed")
if choice.lower() == "maths" and difficulty.lower() == "easy": 
 easym=open("mathseasy.txt" , "r") 
 lines = easym.readlines() 
 print lines[0]
 print lines[1]
 print("A. 4"+'\n'+"B. 6") 
 str_answer_one="A"
 int_answer_one=4
 first_score=answercheck(score, str_answer_one, int_answer_one)
 print lines[2]
 print("A. 5"+'\n'+"B. 6") 
 str_answer_two="A"
 int_answer_two=5
 second_score=answercheck(first_score, str_answer_two, int_answer_two)
 print lines[3]
 print("A. 15"+'\n'+"B. 20") 
 str_answer_three="B"
 int_answer_three=20
 third_score=answercheck(second_score, str_answer_three, int_answer_three)
 print lines[4]
 print("A. 13"+'\n'+"B. 15") 
 str_answer_four="A"
 int_answer_four=13
 fourth_score=answercheck(third_score, str_answer_four, int_answer_four)
 print lines[5]
 print("A. 100"+'\n'+"B. 110") 
 str_answer_five="B"
 int_answer_five=110
 fifth_score=answercheck(fourth_score, str_answer_five, int_answer_five)
 report(fifth_score)
if choice.lower() == "maths" and difficulty.lower() == "medium": 
 mediumm=open("mathsmedium.txt" , "r") 
 lines = mediumm.readlines() 
 print lines[0]
 print lines[1]
 print("A. 30"+'\n'+"B. 35") 
 str_answer_one="A"
 int_answer_one=30
 first_score=answercheck(score, str_answer_one, int_answer_one)
 print lines[2]
 print("A. 100"+'\n'+"B. 110") 
 str_answer_two="B"
 int_answer_two=110
 second_score=answercheck(first_score, str_answer_two, int_answer_two)
 print lines[3]
 print("A. 13"+'\n'+"B. 15") 
 str_answer_three="A"
 int_answer_three=13
 third_score=answercheck(second_score, str_answer_three, int_answer_three)
 print lines[4]
 print("A. 30"+'\n'+"B. 32") 
 str_answer_four="B"
 int_answer_four=32
 fourth_score=answercheck(third_score, str_answer_four, int_answer_four)
 print lines[5]
 print("A. 21"+'\n'+"B. 29") 
 str_answer_five="B"
 int_answer_five=29
 fifth_score=answercheck(fourth_score, str_answer_five, int_answer_five)
 report(fifth_score)

Here is the data in mathseasy.txt:

Welcome to the easy maths quiz.
What's 2+2?
What's 11-6?
What's 5*4?
What's 26/2?
What's 11*10?

Here is the data in mathsmedium.txt:

Welcome to the medium maths quiz.
What's 5*6?
What's 79+31?
What's 26/2?
What's 4*8?
What's 50-21?

• Oscar Smith: Isn't this basically the same as your last question?
• user95591: @OscarSmith new code though?
• Sᴀᴍ Onᴇᴌᴀ: @OscarSmith different code

Answer 1

You could try making the questions/answers declarative and then the logic surrounding the questions/answers could then be factored out. An easy way would be to store the questions/answers in a list of tuples:

data = [("What is 5+5?", 10), ("What is 10+10?", 20) ...]

• Mast: Isn't that a list of tuples?
• trinth: @Mast whoops don't know where my mind went. fixed.
• Mast: Good :-) Now I suspect there should be a ( before the second "What as well, correct?
• bizzey: how would i then check that the useranswer is correct or not? can you do an example of the code for like the first question please

Answer 2

When you have a great deal of if statements that assign a second value based on a first one you can use a dictionary (look-up hash table) to summarize the associations and use just that:

def report(score):
 print("Your final score is "+str(score))
 per=str(score)*(100/5)
 print("You achieved "+per+"%")
 if score==5:
 print("You achieved an A*")
 elif score==4:
 print("You acieved a grade B")
 elif score==3:
 print("You achieved a grade C")
 elif score==2:
 print("You achieved a grade D")
 elif score<=1:
 print("You failed")

Can become:

NUMBER_TO_LETTER = {
 '5' : 'A',
 '4' : 'B',
 '3' : 'C',
 '2' : 'D'
}
def report(score):
 print("Your final score is "+str(score))
 percentage = str(score)*(100/5)
 print("You achieved "+percentage+"%")
 if 2 <= score <= 5:
 print("You achieved an " + NUMBER_TO_LETTER[score])
 else: # Score must be less than 1 because 5 is the max.
 print("You failed.")

So you can see the data is neatly organized in a table and you can avoid repeating the same message over and over again, that can cause spelling errors (elif score==4: print("You acieved a grade B")) and makes code unnecessarily long.

Also you could note that there is an inverse relation between the letter position in the alphabet and the score so:

def report(score):
 print("Your final score is "+str(score))
 percentage = str(score)*(100/5)
 print("You achieved "+percentage+"%")
 if 2 <= score <= 5:
 print("You achieved an " + "ABCDE"[5 - score] )
 else: # Score must be less than 1 because 5 is the max.
 print("You failed.")

That is the final and simplest way to code this.