The writer of this code wants to count the mean and median article length for recent articles on gay marriage in the New York Times. This code has several issues, including errors. When they checked their custom functions against the numpy functions, they noticed some discrepancies. Fix the code so it executes properly, retrieves the articles, and outputs the correct result from the custom functions, compared to the numpy functions.

In [1]:

    

import requests # a better package than urllib2


    

In [2]:

    

def my_mean(input_list):
    list_sum = 0
    list_count = 0
    for el in input_list:
        list_sum += el
        list_count += 1
    return list_sum / list_count


    

In [3]:

    

def my_median(input_list):
    list_length = len(input_list)
    return input_list[list_length/2]


    

In [4]:

    

api_key = "ffaf60d7d82258e112dd4fb2b5e4e2d6:3:72421680"


    

In [6]:

    

# Corrected misspelling in 'api-key"

url = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v2/articlesearch.json?q=gay+marriage&api-key=%s" % api_key


    

In [35]:

    

r = requests.get(url)


    

In [39]:

    

wc_list = []
for article in r.json()['response']['docs']:
    wc_list.append(article['word_count'])


    

In [41]:

    

# The list contained a 'None' and str (not ints). I am correcting it here.

wc_list = [ int(i) for i in wc_list if i != None ]


    

In [43]:

    

my_mean(wc_list)


    

    
Out[43]:





720.7777777777778

In [44]:

    

import numpy as np


    

In [45]:

    

np.mean(wc_list)


    

    
Out[45]:





720.77777777777783

In [58]:

    

# Added a function to calculate the median. 

def my_median(wc_list):
    length = len(wc_list)
    half_length = length / 2
    if length % 2 != 0: 
        return wc_list[int(round(half_length)) + 1]
    else: 
        middles = [wc_list[round(half_length)], wc_list[round(half_length) + 1]]
        return mean(middles)

    my_median(wc_list)


    

    
Out[58]:





684

In [54]:

    

np.median(wc_list)


    

    
Out[54]:





684.0