CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonconditional-statements
Saadiq
Saadiq

Reputation: 101

Simple Question About Conditional Flow Statements

I have a piece of code which reads through Outlook emails and searches for emails based on specific criteria, however, the problem is that once all the emails have been found satisfying the criteria the code does not stop. It just keeps running even though it returns nothing more.

This is what I have so far:

I have tried using break statements and multiple if statements as well as elif. But I cannot seem to get it to work. 

import win32com.client
from datetime import date, timedelta


outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(18).Folders.Item("Riscunit")
messages = inbox.Items

date = date.today() - timedelta(days=1)
subject = "Catalyst"

for message in messages:
    if subject in message.subject and date == message.senton.date():
      print(message.sender)
      print(message.senton.date())
      print(message.senton.time())
      print(message.body)
    elif subject != message.subject and date != message.senton.date:
     break

I would like the code to retrieve the relevant emails and then stop running. I am new to Python so any help would be much appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 156

Answers (3)

quamrana
quamrana

Reputation: 39404

You may have to limit the number of messages you test to see whether they are what you want:

max = 42
for count, message in enumerate(messages):
    if count > max:
       break
    if subject in message.subject and date == message.senton.date():
       collect(message)   # Do something with this message (print or append to list)

Upvotes: 1

mtm
mtm

Reputation: 719

  • The elif is unnecessary as it's the opposite of the if
  • If you really need to do something when if is false, then an else would be more appropriate--though it's likely you don' need an else here
bag = ['pizza', 'ziplocks','bananas', 'milk glass', 'post-its','spray']
foods  = {1:'pizza', 2:'bananas', 3:'milk'}

# check shopping bag for food

for item in bag:
    for key in foods:
        if foods[key] in item:
            print('eat ' + foods[key]);
            break
    else:
        print('put ' + item + ' away');

print("done");

and here's another example that does something when your if condition is not met:

messages = [{'subject': 'shopping list', 'date': '05/10/2019', 'body': 'milk'},
            {'subject': 'shopping list', 'date': '05/10/2019', 'body': 'pizza'},
            {'subject': 'holiday', 'date': '12/10/2015', 'body': 'need vacation soon'},
            {'subject': 'shopping list', 'date': '12/10/2015', 'body': 'we need potatoes'}]

date = '05/10/2019'
subject = "shopping list"

for item in messages:
    for key in item:
        if subject in item['subject'] and item['date'] == date:
            print('buy ' + item['body']);
            break
        else:
            print('archive \"' + item['body'] + '\" email');
            break

print("done");

Upvotes: 1

artemis
artemis

Reputation: 7281

It is probably because of the logic of using elif instead of else.

Try this:

import win32com.client
from datetime import date, timedelta


outlook = win32com.client.Dispatch("Outlook.Application").GetNamespace("MAPI")

inbox = outlook.GetDefaultFolder(18).Folders.Item("Riscunit")
messages = inbox.Items

date = date.today() - timedelta(days=1)
subject = "Catalyst"

for message in messages:
    if subject in message.subject and date == message.senton.date():
      print(message.sender)
      print(message.senton.date())
      print(message.senton.time())
      print(message.body)
    else: 
      subject != message.subject and date != message.senton.date
      break

Upvotes: -1

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