>>12http://web.archive.org/web/20070504110113/www.leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/Ive been awfully busy programming lately. My Django-based side project is coming along well and I hope to have it ready for use in a few weeks. Please dont ask more about it, thats really all I can say for now. Anyways, I came across an interesting little math problem today and was hoping some skilled programmers out there could come up with a more elegant solution than mine.
Problem: Star Ratings
People can rate cheeseburgers on my website with a star rating of 0-5 stars (whole stars only), 5 being mighty tasty and 0 being disgusting. I would like to show the average of everyones ratings of a particular cheeseburger to the nearest half star. I have already calculated the average rating as a float (star_sum) and the total number of people that rated the particular cheeseburger (num_raters). The result should be stored as a float in a variable named stars.
My Solution (in Python):
# round to one decimal place and
# separate into whole and fractional parts
parts = str(round(star_sum/num_raters, 1)).split('.')
whole = int(parts[0])
frac = int(parts[1])
if frac < 3:
___frac = 0
elif frac > 7:
___frac = 0
___whole += 1
else:
___frac = 5
# recombine for a star rating rounded to the half
stars = float(str(whole)+.'+str(frac))