Find an item in the list

Question

Make a program that manages the result of the entrance exam. For your happiness, there is only one course and the course has 10 vacancies. The program must keep the list of the 10 classifieds. The program also keeps, in another list (of 20 positions), the waiting list, which contains the successful candidates, but in excess of the number of vacancies (if any candidate is classified give up, one of the waiting list will be called). The waiting list may have up to 20 candidates.

The program must request the applicant’s number and say:

(a) whether it has been classified, or

(b) if he is on the wait list, in this case, indicate where in the queue it is, or

(c) if he was not approved.

Example. Be the classifieds: 20 32 01 14 99 34 21 02 15 07

Be the waiting list (value -1 means there is no candidate): 08 04 10 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1

Examples of queries are: Input / Output 01 "classified" 04 "number 2 on waiting list 97 "not approved"

What I could do:

numeroCandidato = int(input("Entre com o numero do candidato: "))
classificados = [20,32,1,14,99,34,21,2,15,7]
listaDeEspera = [8, 4, 10]
if numeroCandidato not in classificados:
print("nao aprovado")

Answer 1

You’ve come very close to the final solution. To check if the candidate has been approved, just check if your number is on the list of classified:

if numeroCandidato in classificados:
    print("Aprovado")

To check if the candidate is on the waiting list, just check if his number is on the waiting list:

elif numeroCandidato in listaDeEspera:
    print("Lista de espera")

However, it is also asked to indicate the position of the waiting list the candidate is in. To this end, we can use the method index of the object listaDeEspera to obtain the candidate’s position. Remember that since the indexes of a Python list start at 0, we will need to increment the value in one, so that if the candidate is at position 0 of the list, appears position 1:

elif numeroCandidato in listaDeEspera:
    posicao = listaDeEspera.index(numeroCandidato) + 1
    print("Número %d na lista de espera." % posicao)

Finally, if none of the above conditions is met, it should appear that the applicant has not been approved:

else:
    print("Não aprovado")

The final code then would be:

numeroCandidato = int(input("Entre com o numero do candidato: "))

classificados = [20,32,1,14,99,34,21,2,15,7]
listaDeEspera = [8, 4, 10, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1]

if numeroCandidato in classificados:
    print("Aprovado!")
elif numeroCandidato in listaDeEspera:
    posicao = listaDeEspera.index(numeroCandidato) + 1
    print("Número %d na lista de espera." % posicao)
else:
    print("Não aprovado.")