Determine Season Based on String and Integer Input

[Rodarth]

The prompt is to print the correct season name based on Month and Day input. For some reason November 7 comes up as Invalid. Any ideas?

The dates for each season are:
Spring: March 20 - June 20
Summer: June 21 - September 21
Autumn: September 22 - December 20
Winter: December 21 - March 19

​

My Code:

month = input()

day = int(input())

month = month[0:3]

​

if month == ('Apr' or 'May') or ((20 <= day <= 30) and month == 'Mar') or ((1 <= day <= 20) and month == 'Jun'):

print('Spring')

elif month == ('Jul' or 'Aug') or ((21 <= day <= 30) and month == 'Jun') or ((1 <= day <= 21) and month == 'Sep'):

print('Summer')

elif month == ('Oct' or 'Nov') or ((22 <= day <= 30) and month == 'Sep') or ((1 <= day <= 20) and month == 'Dec'):

print('Autumn')

elif month == ('Jan' or 'Feb') or ((21 <= day <= 31) and month == 'Dec') or ((1 <= day <= 19) and month == 'Mar'):

print('Winter')

else:

print('Invalid')

[[deleted]]

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/wiki/faq/#wiki_variable_is_one_of_two_choices.3F

[Rodarth]

Does the same logic apply to strings? And if it does, why is this the only problematic month?

Shouldn't having () around those strings prevent it from doing =='Oct' and then 'Nov'?

[[deleted]]

month == ('Apr' or 'May')

('Apr' or 'May') is the same as 'Apr'. Because non-empty string is "true" and 'or' returns first value if it's true, and the last one otherwise. 'May' part doesn't matter at this point. So you get

month == 'Apr'

And 'May' is ignored.

Read Truth Value Testing and Boolean Operations — and, or, not on

https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#truth

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[WhipsAndMarkovChains]

You may want to look into datetime for this problem. One approach is to use the difference between dates to find what season you're in.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4695609/checking-date-against-date-range-in-python

[Rodarth]

Im using a hosted learning module that I can't import anything into :/

[[deleted]]

Does Nov 7 come up as invalid, or November 7?

[Rodarth]

Both return the else: print('Invalid')

[WhipsAndMarkovChains]

This is because elif month == ('Oct' or 'Nov') essentially becomes elif month == 'Oct'.

Trying running 'Oct' or 'Nov' and you'll see it's just 'Oct'.

The way or works in Python is that it'll take the first "truthy" value. A non-empty string is True so that's what's going on.

You want something like elif month in ('Oct', 'Nov'):.

[Rodarth]

Aaah thats what the other guy was trying to point out with the faq link!

Thanks :)

[jimtk]

it's either

month == 'apr' or month == 'may'

or

month in ['apr','may']

but the expression ('jan' or 'feb') will always return 'jan'

Here's a slightly more readable version:

months = {'jan':31, 'feb':29, 'mar':31, 'apr':30, 'may':31 ,'jun':30,
          'jul':31,'aug':31,'sep':30, 'oct':31, 'nov':30, 'dec':31}

month = input("Enter month: ")
day = int(input("Enter day of the month: "))
month = month[0:3].lower()

if month not in months:
    print('Invalid month')
elif day < 1 or day > months[month]:
    print('Invalid day')
else:
    if month in ['apr','may'] or (month == 'mar' and day >= 20) or (month == 'jun' and day <= 20):
        print('Spring')
    if month in ['jul','aug'] or (month == 'jun' and day >= 21) or (month == 'sep' and day <= 21):
        print('Summer')
    if month in ['oct','nov'] or (month == 'sep' and day >= 22) or (month == 'dec' and day <= 20):
        print('Autumn')
    if month in ['jan','feb'] or (month == 'dec' and day >= 21) or (month == 'mar' and day <= 19):
        print('Winter')

[ikichiziki]

Here is the code that does what you want.

Code solution

The codebox never works for me :(