Editing, Deleting and Adding Elements to a JSON file using Python
How I handled Editing, Deleting and Adding Quiz Questions in a JSON file for my Simple Quiz written in Python
As you remember in my previous post, I posted a quiz testing my friends and our friendship using the program I made in python. This time, I needed to revise the entire quiz to fit the requirements as given by our instructor.
For this article though, I will be mostly discussing about how I actually handles the Editing, Deleting and Adding of questions in my program. I had used JSON as my database. I simply wanna challenge myself into using a format that I had never used before and gain some new experience.
You may check the entire code here.
For this project, I list down my objectives for my JSON database or must haves before I actually start coding. They are as written below:
- Must be able to create, read and write on a JSON file. One cell in Colab to handle reading and writing codes for the JSON file.
- Another cell containing the delete, edit and adding of questions functions.
Let’s Code
Deciding the content of my Data
In this cell, I had decided the structure of my JSON file. As you can see, a JSON file has resemblance to a dictionary inside an array. Here, I have a Question, A, B, C, and Answer as my keys.
I will leave the explanation of JSON file to the experts. You may read about it here.
Creating and Reading the JSON file
In the image above, I am creating the JSON file using the JSON module. On the second, cell I am now reading the JSON file I had created. Then, I created a simple for loop script just to check if the contents are right in the file I made.
Adding a New Question Function
The image above shows the function I created to handle the addition of the new question. The eval() method is used to convert the formatted string I made into a dictionary. Honestly, I think this one needs to be improved on how I convert my user input into a dictionary that I can then append to my JSON string.
Select Question function
This function handles just the selection of a particular question in the JSON string. I had created this function because I realize for my edit and delete function I needed to select a question. Instead of repeating the code inside the edit and delete function, I could just made one function to be reused by the two functions. This function made me fall in love with the great use of creating functions for things you may use repeatedly.
As you can see above, I had added an if statement and a try-except statement. They will be handling the error I might encounter if the user entered a number less than -1 and if the user entered a number that is more than the length of the JSON string. In this way, the program will still execute instead of terminate entirely.
Edit Question function
This function handles the editing of a question just in case. I had used if-elif-else statement for this function. I am thinking of another method to use that will be better but for now this is what we have that works.
Delete Function
This function simply does one thing and that is to delete an entire question in the JSON file. It will delete including the choices and answers.
You might be wondering why in every function I have above, it always end calling the game_on() function. The reason is after every execution of the function above, I want it to return to the main function executing the whole game which is the game_on() function.
I had learned alot from this quiz exercise and actually discovered how useful creating functions are in a project since you can reuse them again and again. I still need to work on some adjustments for this project. Maybe adjust some codes to make it more efficient. Anyway, this ends my article. Till the next time!
