Else statement issues

Q&A
#1

Screen Link:

My Code: 


capitals = {'France':'Paris','Spain':'Madrid','United Kingdom':'London',
            'India':'New Delhi','United States':'Washington DC','Italy':'Rome',
            'Denmark':'Copenhagen','Germany':'Berlin','Greece':'Athens',
            'Bulgaria':'Sofia','Ireland':'Dublin','Mexico':'Mexico City'
            }

user_input = input('Please enter a country:> ')
user_input = input('Please enter capital:> ')
if user_input ==  str('country') is str:
    print('country name')
elif user_input ==  str('capital') is str:
    print('capital name')
else:
    print('please choose country or capital')

What I expected to happen:
The Else statement “Please choose country or capital” would happen if I didn’t put a country or a capital name in the browser

What actually happened:

'please choose country or capital' came after entering any of the capitals
#2

There are several problems with your code.

user_input = input('Please enter a country:> ')
user_input = input('Please enter capital:> ')

The two inputs are assigned to variables with the same name. So the second input overwrites the first.

  1. str('country')

Notice that country is already a string because it is between ' '. So you are transforming a string into a string. It does not raise an error but it makes no sense. Also, if you ran str(country) (without the ' '), you’d get an error since country is not defined in your code.

  1. str('country') is str

The above expression returns a boolean. If str('country') is string it returns True, if not it returns False. In this case, it will always return True. Therefore, if user_input == str('country') is str: is the same as if user_input == True: and so the if statement will never return True, which means print('country name') will never be accessed.

But even if print('country name') was accessed, it would just print the string country name because it is between ' ', which makes it a string. And if you use str(country name) (without the ' '), you’ll get an error since country name is not defined in your code.

These exactly three errors also happen in the following part:

elif user_input ==  str('capital') is str:
    print('capital name')

So, what you have is:

  • if user_input == True -> this is false, so python will move on to the elif clause;

  • elif user_input == True -> this is false too, so python will move on to the else clause;

  • The else clause finally prints the string you see, 'please choose country or capital'.

There is a lot to fix in your code. I hope this can help you do it.

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