Why is this simple python program not working the way I want it to?

Question

The following code snippet is meant to allow the user to input the answer to a question. They are allowed to enter four answers: either y or Y for “yes”, or n or N for “no”. The program is supposed to print out the received answer if the entry is valid, and print out an error message otherwise.

answer = input("What is your answer? ")
if answer == "y" or "Y":
    print("You answered yes")
elif answer == "n" or "N":
    print("You answered no")
else:
    print("You didn’t enter an acceptable answer")

It just keeps on saying that I answered yes regardless if I put n or N or some random thing. Can someone explain it to me?

Answer 1

The precedence of the or is not what you are expecting. Instead try:

answer = input("What is your answer? ")
if answer in ("y", "Y"):
    print("You answered yes")
elif answer in ("n", "N"):
    print("You answered no")
else:
    print("You didn’t enter an acceptable answer")

Or maybe like:

answer = input("What is your answer? ")
if answer.lower() == "y":
    print("You answered yes")
elif answer.lower() == "n":
    print("You answered no")
else:
    print("You didn’t enter an acceptable answer")

Answer 2

Your first condition will always return true because "Y" is always truthy.

Try: if answer == "y" or answer == "Y":

And the same modification for the other conditional.

Answer 3

If you want to check a variable shortly as you want, use something like this:

if answer in ["y","Y"]:

It will return True if answer is y or Y