Sum of the items in a dictionary - python-3.x

Question

I've been trying to do an exercise.. The objective is to sum the items and see which one has the highest value and return, each letter is corresponded in a value. For example, "Babel" worths 10 points (3+1+3+1+2) and "Xadrez" worths 21 points (8+1+2+1+1+8), so the program is supposed to return "Xadrez".
My code's this:
def better(l1):
dic = {'D':2, 'C':2, 'L':2, 'P':2, 'B':3, 'N':3, 'F':4, 'G':4,
'H':4, 'V':4, 'J':5, 'Q':6, 'X':8, 'Y':8, 'Z':8}
for word in dic.keys():
l1 = []
best = 0
sum = 0
word = word.split()
word = word.item()
sum = word.item()
best = word
l1 = l1.append(word)
return best
My idea is trying to split each word and sum the value of each letter in each word. Thanks.
Another example: (['ABACO', 'UTOPIA', 'ABADE']) >>'ABACO'

Answer 1

I would start by assigning a score value for every letter. This makes it easier to score the words because each letter has a specified value
points = \
{ 0: '_' # wild letter
, 1: 'eaionrtlsu'
, 2: 'dg'
, 3: 'bcmp'
, 4: 'fhvwy'
, 5: 'k'
, 8: 'jx'
, 10: 'qz'
}
You can easily build a dic like you have. It's better to define this outside of your scoring function because the dic can be reused instead of being recreated each time the function is run (as it does in your code)
dic = \
{ letter:score for (score,set) in points.items() for letter in set }
# { '_': 0
# , 'e': 1
# , 'a': 1
# , 'i': 1
# , ...
# , 'x': 8
# , 'q': 10
# , 'z': 10
# }
Scoring a word using dic is easy thanks to built-in sum function
def score_word (word):
return sum (dic[letter] for letter in word)
print (score_word ("babel")) # 9
print (score_word ("xadrez")) # 23
Now we need a max_word function that can determine the "max" of two words, w1 and w2
def max_word (w1, w2):
if (score_word (w1) > score_word (w2)):
return w1
else:
return w2
print (max_word ("babel", "xadrez")) # xadrez
Now it's easy to make a function that can accept any number of words, max_words
def max_words (w = None, *words):
if not words:
return w
else:
return max_word (w, max_words (*words))
print (max_words ('abaco', 'utopia', 'abade')) # abaco
print (max_words ()) # None