# Summing the digits of a sum of digits of a sum

I'm a beginner in Python, and computer languages in general, and I'm totally stumped on how to format this iteration into a function. The iteration takes the sum of someone's birth year, month, and day and adds it together to create a sum of those numbers, and then the second iteration takes the first sum and adds those numbers together to create a final sum.

I have the users input their birthyear, month, and day (all converted to int) and this is the first sum (Example: A bday of 01/01/1997= 1999):

first_sum=b_yr + b_dy + b_mo


Then the first iteration takes the sum and adds the numbers together (Example: 1999 = 1+9+9+9 = 28):

z = first_sum
zstr1=str(z)
accum1=0
for x in zstr1:
accum1 += int(x)
(accum1)


Then the second iteration takes the first sum and adds those numbers again to create the final sum (Example: 28 = 2+8 = 10):

str2=str(accum1)
accum2=0
for cnt2 in str2:
accum2 += int(cnt2)


Despite your code being cumbersome, I would like to point out that you did well by writing for x in zstr1, iterating over the characters of the string. Python beginners often try to iterate over character indexes instead, resulting in unnatural Python code.

I would decompose the problem differently than @jonrsharpe. sum_digits(n) is a generally useful operation to define as a function.

def sum_digits(n):
return sum(int(char) for char in str(n))

sum_digits(sum_digits(b_yr + b_mo + b_dy))


Actually, it's not necessary to conflate the summing and the digit breakdown.

def digits(n):
return [int(char) for char in str(n)]

sum(digits(sum(digits(b_yr + b_mo + b_dy))))


The last line reads just like the problem description: "sum of the digits of the sum of the digits of the year, month, and day".

Here's another implementation of digits(n), using a generator. This avoids stringification.

def digits(n):
"""Produce the base-10 digits of n from least to most significant."""
while n:
yield n % 10
n /= 10

• sum_digits could be sum(map(int, str(n))) if I am not mistaken. Apr 23 '15 at 15:20

A few notes on your code:

• You should be more consistent with whitespace. The style guide suggests a space each side of = in assignments - you use this once, but elsewhere leave them out.
• Variable names could be a bit more useful/consistent - for example, you have z (what does that mean?) and zstr1 but str2 (why not str1 and str2, or zstr1 and zstr2?) A good choice of name can make the code much easier to understand.
• In fact, z is redundant; you can replace z = first_sum and zstr1=str(z) with zstr1 = str(first_sum).

Your approach is fine as far as it goes, but here is a neater implementation:

def process(b_yr, b_dy, b_mo):
total = b_yr + b_dy + b_mo
for _ in range(2):
total = sum([int(char) for char in str(total)])

1. You need to sum over the digits of a number - it uses a "list comprehension" to apply the same process to each character/digit in the number, and sum to add up the total.
2. You need to repeat this process twice - it uses a for loop to repeat the process, rather than just writing it out again; this reduces duplication and makes it much easier to repeat the process a different number of times.
As a more shorter and more "functional programming", but perhaps less readable, alternative for step 1. you can replace the list comprehension with map:
total = sum(map(int, str(total)))