CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python
Spring
Spring

Reputation: 13

Python 3.8 (Hangman Game Input)

From the question I’m about to ask you will realize that I’m just a beginner. Anyways, so I’m assigning a input function to a variable word. I then def a function and in that function I say:

if ' ' or '-' in word:
     print('Error cannot...')

My issue here is whenever I run this and enter a word for my input it always prints Error cannot... even when I don’t have spaces or '-' in my word. That’s all thanks if you decide to help me out.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 96

Answers (3)

Brown Owl
Brown Owl

Reputation: 1

you have wrong logic or return True if one or more statements are True. In you case you can solve it in different ways.

 if " " in word or '-' in word:
    print('Error cannot.....')

Either you can have a list of characters which can iterate through the word to check whether a word contains any of those characters. For example

 l = ['-',' ']
 for c in l : 
   if c in word:
     print('Error....')
     break

Upvotes: 0

Michael Francis
Michael Francis

Reputation: 8747

The or operator must compare two boolean values. So when you do

if ' ' or '-' in word:

Python will convert both sides of the or into boolean values (True or False). The problem here is that the left side of the or is just ' ', which in Python is considered 'truthy' (in an if statement it will evaluate to True). So what you're really doing here is

if True or '-' in word:

which will always be True. (True or anything is always True no matter what anything is).

What you most likely intended was

if ' ' in word or '-' in word:

Upvotes: 1

Seth
Seth

Reputation: 2370

Try using this: if " " in word or "-" in word:. The reason you got the outcome you did is because a non-empty string is "truthy," in other words, it is considered true. If you have true on one side of an or and false on the other, the or will still output true.

Upvotes: 3

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