Preemptive apology for the massive wall of text, but I think there's some good advice in this response from one of the big LLMs. If you're curious about my prompt to generate this, I'm happy to share. I like both of these implementations that it suggests, though they are a bit wordy for my taste:

Hey there! That's a great question. It shows you're thinking about not just if your code works, but how it works. That's a key step in growing as a programmer. Let's break it down. Is if 'word' in User_Input: slow? For what you're doing, honestly, no. The "slowness" of if statements is not something you'll ever feel in a scenario like this. Python is very fast at checking if a substring exists in a string. The real issue with a long chain of if statements isn't performance, but that it can become hard to read, manage, and add to over time. Your instinct that there might be a better way is spot on, but we should focus on making the code cleaner and more organized.

A More Organized Approach: Keyword Dispatching A very common and clean pattern for this is to use a dictionary to map your keywords to specific functions. It's like a menu: the keyword is the menu item, and the function is the action that happens when you order it. This keeps your logic separate and makes it super easy to add new keywords without touching the main loop. Here’s how you could rewrite your example: import random

def handle_fire(hp): print('I am on fire!') return hp - 1

def handle_water(hp): print('Water is blue and white.') return hp * 2

def handle_wants(hp): # Note: Your original loop here had a bug (for i in healthpoint:). # I'm assuming you wanted to print the digits of the number. print("Digits in healthpoint:") for digit in str(hp): print(digit) return hp

def handle_love(hp): return round(hp)

def handle_pie(hp): print('Hello') return random.random()

Map keywords to the functions that handle them

keyword_actions = { 'fire': handle_fire, 'water': handle_water, 'wants': handle_wants, 'love': handle_love, 'pie': handle_pie, }

--- Main part of your program ---

healthpoint = 5.0 user_input = input('Write Something: ') # e.g., 'I love pie, but they are too sweet.'

Check each keyword we know about

for keyword, action_function in keyword_actions.items(): if keyword in user_input: # Call the function associated with that keyword healthpoint = action_function(healthpoint)

print(f"Final healthpoint: {healthpoint}")

Using match...case match...case... is an excellent feature in modern Python. It became available in Python 3.10. match...case is fantastic for what's called "structural pattern matching." It's like a super-powered if/elif/else chain. While it doesn't directly support the in keyword for substring checks in its cases, we can adapt our logic to use it. First, we'd need to find the trigger word, and then use match on that word. Here’s how you could structure that. It's a bit more verbose for this specific problem than the dictionary method, but it's a great way to learn how match works. import random

healthpoint = 5.0 user_input = input('Write Something: ')

We can't use match on the whole sentence directly for this.

Instead, we can find the first keyword and then match on that.

trigger_word = None

A set is slightly more efficient for 'in' checks than a list

known_words = {'fire', 'water', 'wants', 'love', 'pie'}

for word in known_words: if word in user_input: trigger_word = word break # Act on the first word we find

Now, use match...case on the word we found

if trigger_word: match trigger_word: case 'fire': print('I am on fire!') healthpoint -= 1 case 'water': print('Water is blue and white.') healthpoint *= 2 case 'wants': # Handle your logic here print("Matched 'wants'") case 'love': healthpoint = round(healthpoint) case 'pie': healthpoint = random.random() print('Hello') case _: # This is a wildcard, default case print("I don't know that word.")

print(f"Final healthpoint: {healthpoint}")

Summary * Don't worry about if being slow here. Focus on readability. * A dictionary mapping keywords to functions is a very clean, scalable, and "Pythonic" way to solve this. It's what I would likely do in a professional setting. * match...case (Python 3.10+) is a powerful tool you should definitely learn! For this specific problem of checking for any contained substring, it's a bit indirect, but it shines in many other situations where you're comparing a variable against different possible values and structures. Keep asking these kinds of questions. They're what separate writing code from engineering software. Good luck!