Why is my program goes straight to else block when it should enter if

Question

I was trying to make a simple survey bot, but I had trouble with the second if statement. it just ignores the if and elif, and goes straight to the else statement. I have tried everything, and even though it's probably going to be an easy solution please help...

 import sys

 yes = "yes"
 no = "no"
 experience_good = "yes"
 contact = "1"

 print("How many times have you bean contacted by us in the past quarter (3 months)")
 contact = sys.stdin.readline()

 if contact != 0:
     print("Was your experience was us good? Type a 1 for yes or 0 for no")
     experience_good = sys.stdin.readline()
     print("experiencence_good is", experience_good)
     # The above line was just to double check the variable was inputted 
correctly
     if experience_good is 1:
         print("Good to hear that.")
     elif experience_good is 0:
         print("Sorry about that. What could we be doing better?")
         doing_better = sys.stdin.readline()
     else:
         print("Stuff's been messed up")

The output I get is just:

How many times have you bean contacted by us in the past quarter (3 months)

3

Was your experience was us good? Type a 1 for yes or 0 for no

1

exp_good is 1

Stuff's been messed up

@Sergio Tulentsev and @Emerson SD, you guys made a minor mistake. In the `contact = sys.stdin.readline()` return a string not an integer, then you are checking `contact != 0`. Fix that and it should work correctly — theBuzzyCoder, Jun 17 '17 at 14:22

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 04 '17 at 05:22

because experience_good is never 1! It's starts off as

experience_good = "yes"

Then halfway through it maybe changed as

experience_good = sys.stdin.readline()

At this point if the user typed in 1, what the variable will hold is the string value '1' which is not 1 so you need to

experience_good = int(sys.stdin.readline().strip())

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 04 '17 at 05:23

You must use == for int equality test:

if contact != 0:
    print("Was your experience was us good? Type a 1 for yes or 0 for no")
    experience_good = sys.stdin.readline()
    print("experiencence_good is", experience_good)
    # The above line was just to double check the variable was inputted  correctly
    if experience_good == 1:
        print("Good to hear that.")
    elif experience_good == 0:
        print("Sorry about that. What could we be doing better?")
        doing_better = sys.stdin.readline()
    else:
        print("Stuff's been messed up")

Cast the contact and experience_good to int:

contact = int(contact)

experience_good = int(experience_good)

Bishwas Mishra · Answer 3 · 2017-06-04T05:26:55.013

1

Indentation problem (now edited in question). Bring the last elif and last else block one indent backwards.

if experience_good == 1:
    print("Good to hear that.")
elif experience_good == 0:
    print("Sorry about that. What could we be doing better?")
    doing_better = sys.stdin.readline()
else:
    print("Stuff's been messed up")

Use == to evaluate a value. When you use 'is' it will compare the objects. Not it's value.

edited Jun 04 '17 at 05:26

answered Jun 04 '17 at 05:25

Bishwas Mishra

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Why do you think it's the indentation? – Sergio Tulentsev Jun 04 '17 at 05:26
Indentation was fine in the original revision, and it was not the problem. (it got messed up in subsequent edits) – Sergio Tulentsev Jun 04 '17 at 05:32
Ok. Indentation is fixed. Can you also fix the last line of output: Stuff's been messed up – Bishwas Mishra Jun 04 '17 at 05:36
And also this post title. @Sergio Tulentsev – Bishwas Mishra Jun 04 '17 at 05:39

Why is my program goes straight to else block when it should enter if

3 Answers3