Community post

learning Python 3 diary#3

Dear Diary,

I've caught a cold couple of days ago and it has progressed and bloomed into a light fever. Being unable to think properly I have resigned to reading and mostly sleeping.

I feel a lot better so have restarted on my learning to code journey ^^

Today on the menu are Conditionals :D

Finally!!!

sick = input("Are you sick? ")
if sick.startswith("y"):
    print("Go home and rest!")
else:
    pass

if sick.startswith("n"):
    print("Get ready for some Pizza!")
else:
    print("let's do Pizza next time")

It feels like learning ABC at the moment :D

Especially since it's easy to find loopholes 🤔
Like in this exercise, if I enter two words instead of one the second part isn't executed.

I suppose space somehow interferes with the second part and there are more things needed to make it run even if i enter "lol lol lol" :D

~Anmitsu

Replies (7)

Hey @anmitsu. Good work on learning those conditionals ^_^ Here are some tips.

else clauses aren't mandatory, so if yours only contains pass, you are fine just leaving it out completely.

if you have a conditional you only want to test if the previous condition fails, you can use elif. For example:

sick = input("Are you sick? ")
if sick.startswith("y"):
    print("Go home and rest!")
    print("let's do Pizza next time")
elif sick.startswith("n"):
    print("Get ready for some Pizza!")
else:
    # user input didn't start with y OR n
    print("Just give me a straight answer!")

You are sort of correct that the space is "interfering" with the second part, but you're incorrect that it is not executing. Space is not considered alphabetic, so any string with a space will return False. For example, "lol lol".isalpha() returns False; "lollol".isalpha(), however, would return True. So your input is just failing the second conditional test you were expecting to pass.

If you were to replace that second conditional with...
```
if all(char.isalpha() or char.isspace() for char in a_number):
```
...it should work as intended.

I hope you are able to kick that cold and feel better soon!