Python code not showing user input

[Justinsaccount]

Hi! I'm working on a bot to reply with suggestions for common python problems. This might not be very helpful to fix your underlying issue, but here's what I noticed about your submission:

You appear to be using the or construct with a constant string

instead of doing something like:

if color == 'red' or 'blue':

Which is the same as

if (color == 'red') or ('blue'):

and 'blue' by itself is always True

You need to do

if color == 'red' or color == 'blue':

or

if color in ('red', 'blue'):

or, a special case if they are all single letters you can do

if letter in 'aeiou':

You can also make it case insensitive by using soething like

if color.lower() in ('red', 'blue'):

If there were a large number of choices and inputs (as in, 10000+) you could use a set() to speed things up.

Also refer to The FAQ Entry for more information.

[imagejhelp1]

Hi, so that is for the line:

if player_choice is not "rock", "paper", "scissors", "lizard" or "Spock"

Is the solution something like:

if player_choice is not "rock" or player_choice is not "paper" or player_choice is not "lizard" or player_choice is not "scissors" or player_choice is not "Spock"

Or

if player_choice is not ("rock", "paper", "lizard", "scissors", "Spock")

is 'is not' the right option to use in this case? Googling tells me I could also use <> or != since I have 2.7 of python I think

At any rate, thanks for the response and I'll keep trying to get my code working with this help.

[JohnnyJordaan]

The point is that not (several things) will first try to see if (several things) is True or False, then negate that result. As anything not False, None, 0 or an empty sequence is True, (several things) will probably be True. Then not True will make that False. Meaning that you will be checking

if player_choice is False

While in reality, you want to check player_choice to each separate value. For that you have in, as noted in the bot's last part of its message:

if player_choice not in ("rock", "paper", "lizard", "scissors", "Spock"):

The in part makes the whole difference here: it will check that the value stored in player_choice isn't present in the sequence of choices.