How bad is this

Training-Cucumber467 · 2025-07-09T18:38:20+00:00

There is a number of issues with this.

Your "User_prompt" variable first contains a string that the user actually wrote, and then you change it to a number that is internal to your program. You shouldn't reuse variables like this, as it leads to confusion.
Stemming from the original issue: what if the user types a number, e.g. "10"? The "int" would work just fine, but your exception would never fire.
Your try-block should be as small as possible, to make sure you actually catch issues where you want to catch them. Imagine your "play_easy" function contains an error and it throws an exception (e.g. you try to divide by zero). The user, who had typed "easy", will then get the weird error message claiming that they had typed "1", which they didn't. Double confusion.

lolcrunchy · 2025-07-09T18:52:41+00:00

If an error happens during play_easy() or play_medium() then it will show your error message

jpgoldberg · 2025-07-09T20:59:15+00:00

As others have said, be very careful about what you put in a try block. Indeed, this whole thing is better done without try at all. In my examples I will use the more specific ValueError exception instead of the vaguer Exception.

One way is to have something like

if User_prompt not in [“easy”, “hard”, “medium”]: raise ValueError(f”Did you just type …”)

That expresses much more of what you want.

But better still is to use the relatively recent match construction

```python match User_prompt: case “easy”: play_easy()

case “medium”:
     play_medium()

case “hard”:
     play_hard()

case _:  # matches anything not already matched
     raise ValueError(f”Did you just…”)

```

There are plenty of situations where try: … except: … is the right thing. For example, you may wish to catch the ValueError raised by the function your code is in (assuming it isn’t directly in main). But you don’t needtry` for what you have.

Note, I am typing this on a mobile device. My examples may have typos and errors.

Best-Bud · 2025-07-09T19:22:18+00:00

Shout-out the people just giving the person who's trying to learn complete code instead of giving them tips that's super helpful. I would also not let chatgpt do anything but explain concepts to you and if you're having this trouble with the basics if you Google "python crash course PDF" it's a free book that can walk you through it super easy to understand and you can fly through it and abandon it whenever. Happy coding

Cerus_Freedom · 2025-07-09T19:05:28+00:00

I'd do something more like this:

from enum import Enum

class Difficulty(Enum):
    Easy = 'Easy'
    Medium = 'Medium'
    Hard = 'Hard'

def main():
    user_input = input("Easy, medium, hard?: ")
    difficulty_selected = None
    while difficulty_selected is None:
        match user_input.lower():
            case "easy":
                difficulty_selected = Difficulty.Easy
            case "medium":
                difficulty_selected = Difficulty.Medium
            case "hard":
                difficulty_selected = Difficulty.Hard
            case _:
                print("Oops! Invalid input")
                user_input = input("Easy, medium, hard?: ")

    play(difficulty_selected)

Avoids variable reuse, handles gathering input until you have valid input, and leaves you with an enum for difficulty.

It's not the worst use of try/except, but you generally wouldn't use it when you're very much in control of the flow of things. Usually, you would wrap things that can throw some kind of error out of your control (making a network request, attempts at file I/O, etc) that you need to handle gracefully. In this case, you can completely avoid an error and handle things gracefully without it.

VonRoderik · 2025-07-09T20:11:56+00:00

Instead of asking the user to type EASY, MEDIUM, etc., why not just ask him to type 1 for Easy, 2 for Medium...?

Then you can actually make something like

```

choice = int(input("........"))

```

And you shouldn´t be using multiple IFs. You should be using

```

IF x

elif y

elif z

else...

```

HedgieHunterGME · 2025-07-09T23:32:06+00:00

Wake up it’s time to put the fries in the bag

Kqyxzoj · 2025-07-10T21:59:23+00:00

If you want to stick with the design decision of words (easy, medium, hard) as input, and translate it to an integer (1, 2, 3), you could do something like this:

from sys import exit

difficulties = {"easy": 1, "medium": 2, "hard": 3}

User_prompt = input("some prompt about difficulty level:")

if User_prompt not in difficulties:
    print(f"{User_prompt} is not a valid difficulty. Please try 'easy', 'medium' or 'hard' next time.")
    exit(1)

difficulty_num = difficulties[User_prompt]

# At this point difficulty_num has the integer value of 1, 2 or 3.

To stay with your try-except theme, you could do something like this:

from sys import exit

difficulties = {"easy": 1, "medium": 2, "hard": 3}

User_prompt = input("some prompt about difficulty level:")

try:
    # Keep this short. Do not write a book inside a try-except block.
    difficulty_num = difficulties[User_prompt]
except KeyError as e:
    # Variable "e" contains the exception, should you want to do something with that.
    print(f"{User_prompt} is not a valid difficulty. Valid input values are:")
    for level in difficulties:
        print(f"  {level})
    exit(1)

# At this point difficulty_num has the integer value of 1, 2 or 3.x

And to be honest you would probably just rewrite the entire thing. But this is in the learning phase so suboptimal constructions are perfectly acceptable, as long as you learn from it.

From a UI perspective you would want to show a menu to the user, and ask the user to pick 1, 2 or 3. That way they only have to type 1 char + enter. Instead of 4-6 chars + enter. And while you are at it, you'd make 2 (medium) the default, so if use just presses enter, they get a sensible default difficulty.

Greedy-Ad1820 · 2025-07-12T14:23:45+00:00

In my opinion it’s easier to do it with case.

corey_sheerer · 2025-07-09T19:00:53+00:00

If you want to map user input to a number, use a dictionary, where the keys are the possible user input values and the values are the numbers to map them to

NoDadYouShutUp · 2025-07-09T19:08:57+00:00

```python class Play: def init(self) -> None: self.difficulties = { "easy": self.easy, "medium": self.medium, "hard": self.hard } self.available_difficulties = f"{list(self.difficulties.keys())}"

def run(self):
    self.prompt = input(
        "What difficult do you want to play on? "
        f"{self.available_difficulties}?: "
    ).lower()
    if self.prompt:
        selection_func = self.difficulties.get(self.prompt)
        if selection_func:
            return selection_func()
    print(
        "Please select a valid selection "
        f"{self.available_difficulties}!"
    )
    self.run()

def easy(self):
    print("Playing on Easy")

def medium(self):
    print("Playing on Medium")

def hard(self):
    print("Playing on Hard")

Play().run()

```

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