For the YourName input() I would like to get a value that's a string. Hence, it shouldn't be a float, int, etc. In this example I would like to replace "Sunny" with any value that's a string to make the while loop accept the input.
YourName = ''
while YourName != "Sunny":
print("Please type in your name")
YourName = input()
print(YourName + " is correct")
Thanks in advance, best
Sentino
As mentioned in the comments you could use something similar to the following:
YourName = input("Please enter your name: ")
while True:
if YourName.isalpha():
break
else:
print("Must enter string")
print("Please type in your name")
YourName = input("Please enter your name: ")
continue
isinstance() is a built-in function that checks to see if a variable is of a specific class, e.g. isinstance(my_var, str) == True. However, the Input() function always returns a string. Thus, if you want to make sure the input was all letters you want to use .isalpha(). You could also use Try/except. As @SiHa said this SO question has a great response.
As pointed out in the comments, this answer will not work if there is a space in the string. If you want to allow multiple name formats you can use Regex. for example you can do the following:
import re
YourName = input("Please enter your name: ")
while True:
if re.fullmatch(r"[a-zA-Z]+\s?[a-zA-Z]+", YourName) is not None:
break
else:
print("Must enter string")
print("Please type in your name")
YourName = input("Please enter your name: ")
continue
Using Regular Expressions will give you more control on the inputs than regular string methods. Docs, Python Regex HOWTO. re is a standard library that comes with python and will give you the most flexibility. You can use regex101 to help you test and debug.
What the re.fullmatch() will return a match object if found and None if not. It says the input can be any lower or uppercase letter with an optional space in the middle followed by more letters.
If you don't want to import a package then you can loop through your input object and check to see if all characters are a space or alpha using:
all([x.isalpha() | x.isspace() for x in YourName])
however this will not say how many spaces there are or where they are. It would be optimal to use Regex if you want more control.
It's possible that you're using Python 2.7, in which case you need to use raw_input() if you want to take the input as a string directly.
Otherwise, in Python 3, input() always returns a string. So if the user enters "3@!%," as their name, that value will be stored as a string (You can check the type of a variable by using type(variable)).
If you want to check to make sure the string contains only letters, you can use the method isalpha() and isspace() (in my example code, I'll assume you want to allow spaces, but you can exclude that part if you want to require one word responses).
Because these methods operate on characters, you need to use a for loop:
YourName =""
while YourName is not "Sunny" or not all(x.isalpha() or x.isspace() for x in YourName):
#You can pass a string as a prompt for the user here
name = input("please enter name")
print (YourName)
However, I should note that this check is totally redundant since no string containing a non-letter character could ever be equal to "Sunny".
As others have pointed out, input() always returns a string.
You can use the str.isalpha method to check the character is a letter.
YourName = ''
while True:
print("Please type in your name")
YourName = input()
failed = False
for char in YourName:
if not char.isalpha():
failed = True
if not failed:
break
Example:
Please type in your name
> 123
Please type in your name
> John1
Please type in your name
John
John is correct
