I want to write this if statement as compact as possible (to avoid having duplicate code)
if length == 10 if boolean is False or length == 13 if boolean is True:
The part that PyCharm does not like is the
if boolean is True
It asks for a colon.
PyCharm does not allow me to run it. Does anyone have a nice compact solution to this if?
I think you meant
if (not boolean and length == 10) or (boolean and length == 13):
The parentheses aren't necessary, but I think they help readability. #jonsharpe's solution is even shorter and only has to evaluate boolean once, but it may be harder to read, especially if you're not familiar with Python's ternary expressions.
Never use is for equality comparison (that's what == is for), but boolean types should never be explicitly compared to True or False anyway.
You can use a conditional expression (also known as a "ternary") to write it out much more concisely:
if length == 13 if boolean else length == 10:
or, equivalently:
if length == (13 if boolean else 10):
Per the documentation:
The expression x if C else y first evaluates the condition, C (not x); if C is true, x is evaluated and its value is returned; otherwise, y is evaluated and its value is returned.
Related
I've been tinkering a little with Python operators and came across something I'm not sure about.
If I perform a bitwise operation (&, |) on 2 integers I will get unsurprisingly their bitwise value.
Meaning:
>>> a = 11
>>> b = 3
>>> a & b
3
This is because it performs bitwise AND on the binary representation of these numbers.
However, if I use the built in and operator I will get the second variable, irrespective of its type:
>>> b and a
11
>>> 'b' and 'a'
'a'
Why is it so?
Logical operators operate on the truthiness of an object. Every object has truth value, unless it has a __bool__ method that is explicitly overridden to raise an error. The major difference between a and b (logical) and a & b (bitwise) is that the former apply to any objects, while the latter only apply to numeric types that support bitwise operations1.
Python's logical operators are specifically designed to return the result of the last object evaluated:
a and b: Returns a Falsy a, or b (if a is truthy)
a or b: Returns a Truthy a, or b (if a if falsy)
From the tutorial:
The Boolean operators and and or are so-called short-circuit operators: their arguments are evaluated from left to right, and evaluation stops as soon as the outcome is determined. For example, if A and C are true but B is false, A and B and C does not evaluate the expression C. When used as a general value and not as a Boolean, the return value of a short-circuit operator is the last evaluated argument.
This property is used semi-idiomatically to check values before accessing them. For example, if a list must contain an element, you can do something like
if x and x[0] == value:
# ...
This will not raise an error, because if x is Falsy (empty), the and expression will return x instead of x[0] == value.
1 Set-like objects also support & as the intersection operator. This is conceptually similar to what the bitwise operator does for integers (you can think of bits as sets), and in no way detracts from the rest of the answer.
The documentation says:
The expression x and y first evaluates x; if x is false, its value is returned; otherwise, y is evaluated and the resulting value is returned.
Since Python considers the boolean value for both strings and non-zero integers to be True, x and y would imply True and True, and since the boolean of the first statement is not False, the second statement is evaluated and the resulting value (which is the value of the second term) is returned.
The first case with and:
>>> b and a #(11 and 3, both the values evaluates to be true because non-zero)
11
>>> 'b' and 'a' #(again both are evaluated to be true because non-empty)
For and all the conditions need to be True, so checked upto the last item if the previous evaluates to be True, hence you get the last item.
Case 1 : A and B
here consider A ,B both are non zeroes for and it checks both A,B that is it first evaluates A if in A after conversion in binary(for understanding consider positive integers , A > 0 and B > 0) whether 1 is present or not , if yes it moves to B and returns B as output. Because and checks both A and B.
A or B
here it checks the A as same as above if it has 1 after converting in to binary,
if A is True it return A (obviously A > 0 so it return A only ).
case 2 : suppose Any 1 in A,B or both A,B are ZEROES
I will try to explain in better way . I hope we all know truth tables for 'AND' and 'OR' and 'XOR'.
Same thing happening here just replace 1's and 0's with any number, if you want you use only 1's and 0's to understand in better way.
print 1>0 == (-1)<0 # => False
print (1>0) == ((-1)<0) # => True
First line prints False.
Second line prints True
The problem is if according to the order comparison operators are above equality operators.
Shouldn't both lines print True? (Or at least the same thing..)
https://www.codecademy.com/en/forum_questions/512cd091ffeb9e603b005713
Both equality and the greater than and less than operators have the same precedence in Python. But you're seeing something odd because of how an expression with multiple comparison operators in a row gets evaluated. Rather than comparing the results of previous calculations using its rules of precedence, Python chains them together with and (repeating the middle subexpressions).
The expression 1 > 0 == -1 < 0 is equivalent to (1 > 0) and (0 == -1) and (-1 < 0) (except that each of the repeated subexpressions, like -1 only gets evaluated once, which might matter if it was a function call with side effects rather than an integer literal). Since the middle subexpression is False, the whole thing is False.
In the second version, the parentheses prevent the comparison chaining from happening, so it just evaluates the inequalities independently and then compares True == True which is True.
I am looking for a short syntax that would look somewhat like x *= -1 where x is a number, but for booleans, if it even exists. It should behave like b = not(b). The interested of this is being able to flip a boolean in a single line when the variable name is very long.
For example, if you have a program where you can turn on|off lamps in a house, you want to avoid writing the full thing:
self.lamps_dict["kitchen"][1] = not self.lamps_dict["kitchen"][1]
You can use xor operator (^):
x = True
x ^= True
print(x) # False
x ^= True
print(x) # True
Edit: As suggested by Guimoute in the comments, you can even shorten this by using x ^= 1 but it will change the type of x to an integer which might not be what you are looking for, although it will work without any problem where you use it as a condition directly, if x: or while x: etc.
print 1>0 == (-1)<0 # => False
print (1>0) == ((-1)<0) # => True
First line prints False.
Second line prints True
The problem is if according to the order comparison operators are above equality operators.
Shouldn't both lines print True? (Or at least the same thing..)
https://www.codecademy.com/en/forum_questions/512cd091ffeb9e603b005713
Both equality and the greater than and less than operators have the same precedence in Python. But you're seeing something odd because of how an expression with multiple comparison operators in a row gets evaluated. Rather than comparing the results of previous calculations using its rules of precedence, Python chains them together with and (repeating the middle subexpressions).
The expression 1 > 0 == -1 < 0 is equivalent to (1 > 0) and (0 == -1) and (-1 < 0) (except that each of the repeated subexpressions, like -1 only gets evaluated once, which might matter if it was a function call with side effects rather than an integer literal). Since the middle subexpression is False, the whole thing is False.
In the second version, the parentheses prevent the comparison chaining from happening, so it just evaluates the inequalities independently and then compares True == True which is True.
PEP 8 discourages the usage of compound statements, but I couldn't find anything about the advised usage of Python's ternary/conditional syntax. For example:
return x if n == 0 else y
i = x if n == 0 else y if n == 1 else z
Does there exist any convention concerning whether the above statements should be preferred to more traditional if/else blocks?
if n == 0:
return x
return y
if n == 0:
i = x
elif n == 1:
i = y
else:
i = z
The "traditional if/else blocks" should generally be preferred.
The only places where you'd still want to use the ternary operator is in places where the syntax requires an expression, e.g. within lambda expressions. Even there, only do it if the ternary expression is short and readable (of course, readability is subjective..)
You can always replace a lambda expression with a small function, but in places where you think that would make the code less readable, it is ok to use lambda expressions with short ternary operations.
I agree with shx2's comments.
Another consideration is testability... using the ternary expr places all the logic on a single line/expr. Basic line-base code coverage tools wouldn't then give a good read on the true coverage of your tests.
Using traditional is/else blocks gives a better reading.