Others have already solved your problem in different ways, but I think that explaining our thinking might also be useful.
Currently, your program is not checking correclty the exit condition (empty line is entered instead of a number). When a new line is entered, your program should do one of the two possible scenarios:
- when an empty line is entered: print result & exit (break)
- else (assume a number is entered): add number to total
No third option is specified, so for now, let's assume that every line will either be an empty line or a number. Will expand it later.
After you decided what to do, the actions should just be easily wrapped in a while True: block - so it should be:
initialize_variables_total_and_count
while True:
read_line
decide_what_to_do:
# in case line was a number
convert_line_to_float
add_float_to_total
increment_count
other_case:
# empty line was entered
calculate_and_print
break
With only two options, you only need to decide once what to do. You can swap around the cases by deciding which condition to check for (and that also results in the other being the "default" behavior for other cases).
It's simpler to check for the line being empty with if line_entered == "":. In this case, any non-empty line is treated like a number, and if it were not one, the float() function will error out and your program crashes.
Checking if a string (the entered line) can be converted to a float is a bit harder. There is just no built-in for that in python, but there is a trick: you can try to convert it to a float, and if that works, it was convertible, and if that errors, it was not. There are other ways too, but this is the simplest - see this question on the topic.
In this case, every number will be added to the total, and every non-number (including the empty line, but also random strings like "asdf") will cause the program to calculate the total and stop.
You can avoid putting both cases into an if-else block by using break or continue. (technicly, you never need to use break or continue, all programs can be written without them. In this case, you could have a boolean variable, named run for example, write while run: and instead of break, do run = False). You can use the fact that both break and continue end the loop early to avoid placing the second case inside an else-block and still have the same behavior (as break and continue already causes skipping the rest of the loop body).
So an example implementation: (testing for == "", not using unstructured control flow)
total = 0
count = 0
run = True
while run:
line = input("Enter your number here: ")
if line == "":
print(total / count)
run = False
else:
total += float(line)
count += 1
I also renamed k to count, x to line and used in-place addition operators.
Another implementation, with break, testing for float with try/except (and re-using that for the entire control flow):
total = 0
count = 0
while True:
line = input("Enter your number here: ")
try:
# order matters here. If the first line errors out, the second won't happen so the count will only be inremented if it was indeed a float
total += float(line)
count += 1
except:
print(f"Average is: {total / count}")
break
Here I removed the run variable, and used a format string to print a bit fancier.
And an example using both continue and break:
total = 0
count = 0
while True:
line = input("Enter your number here: ")
if line != "":
total += float(line)
count += 1
continue
print(f"Average is: {total / count}")
break
You can fancy it a bit with adding more error handling - use three cases:
- user entered empty line: print & exit
- user entered a number: add to total
- user entered something else: ignore line, but tell user what to do
I only provide one example implementation for this, but as you can see, it can be implemented in many ways.
total = 0
count = 0
# good practice to tell the user what to do
print("Average calcuator. Enter numbers one per line to calulate average of, enter empty line to print result & exit!")
while True:
line = input("Enter your number here: ")
if line == "":
print(f"Average is: {total / count}")
break
else:
try:
total += float(line)
count += 1
except ValueError:
print("You should enter a number or an empty line to calculate & exit!")
