Intermediate Python

Practice questions

This page contains a number of questions and exercises to give you a chance to practise what you have learned this session.

You should create a new .py Python file for each exercise.

Exercise 1

The first exercise is to practise searching the documentation. From the list of modules in the standard library, find one that contains a function to give the current date and time.

Fill in the ... in the snippet below.

import ...

time_now = ...

print(time_now.isoformat())

The output should be something like the following, but with today's date and time:

2025-04-01T10:53:15.062603

Exercise 2

Write a function which can accept a string as an argument and return the first word in that string. To start you off, here's skeleton of what the function should look like.

def first_word(l):
    ...
    return ...

you should be able to use it like:

sentence = "This is a collection of words"
word = first_word(sentence)
print(word)

giving the output:

This

Exercise 3

Write a function called count_word_match which accepts three agruments:

1. a string which contains multiple words separated by spaces,
2. a string which gives the word that you want to count the occurrences of and
3. a boolean (True or False) which specifies whether the match should be case-sensitive.

def count_word_match(words, match, case_sensitive):
    ...
    return ...

you should be able to use it like:

count1 = count_word_match("To be or not to be", "to", True)
print(count1)

count2 = count_word_match("To be or not to be", "to", False)
print(count2)

giving the output:

1
2

Exercise 4

For this exercise, you should write a function which can find references, like [4], in some text.

If the function is passed a string like:

"I recommend this book [1] but the other book [3] is better. Some people think that this website [10] is the best but I prefer this [7] one."

it should return a list of integers like:

[1, 3, 10, 7]

The function should be called find_references.

Exercise 5

Take the fnction that you wrote in the last exercise and move it into a module called refs. You should then write a test file called test_refs.py containing:

import refs

text = "I recommend this book [1] but the other book [3] is better. Some people think that this website [10] is the best but I prefer this [7] one."

numbers = refs.find_references(text)

expected = [1, 3, 10, 7]
if numbers == expected:
    print("Test passed")
else:
    print("Test failed:", numbers, "is not the same as", expected)

You should make sure that the test passes when the test script is run with:

python test_references.py