If - Or statements

[Ognjen Bezanov]

Robert Kern wrote:

> Ognjen Bezanov wrote:
>
>> Robert Kern wrote:
>>
>>
>>> Ognjen Bezanov wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> Another newbie-ish question.
>>>>
>>>> I want to create an if statement which will check if a particular
>>>> variable matches one of the statements, and willl execute the
>>>> statement
>>>> if the variable matches any of the statements.
>>>>
>>>> I have tried the following (the pass is just used for testing)
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> if ext[1] == "mp3" or ext[1] == "mp4" or ext[1] == "ogg" or ext[1] ==
>>>> "aac" or ext[1] != "wma":
>>>>       print "we have a valid extension: " + ext[1] #here would go the
>>>> code for decoding the above
>>>>       pass
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It works fine for me. Could you post the smallest complete program
>>> (one that defines ext) that displays the behavior and its entire
>>> output?
>>>
>>> As an aside, is 'ext[1] != "wma"' correct or should it be ==? As
>>> written, you could collapse the whole thing to 'if ext[1] != "wma":'
>>> but I presume it is a typo.
>>
>>
>> filelist = os.listdir('/mnt/cdrom/') #get a list of files from the cdrom
>> drive
>>         for thefile in filelist[:]:   #for each file in the filelist
>>             if thefile.find(".") != -1:   #if the file has an extenstion
>> at all
>>                 ext = thefile.split('.') #get the file extension
>>                 ext[1] =  ext[1].lower() #convert to lowercase
>>                 print ext[1] #debugging, to see the variable before
>> passed to if statement
>>
>>                 if ext[1] == "mp3" or ext[1] == "mp4" or ext[1] == "ogg"
>> or ext[1] == "aac" or ext[1] == "wma":
>>                     print "we have a valid extension: " + ext[1] #here
>> would go the code for decoding the above
>>                     pass
>
>
> It works just fine for me. Note that you could (and probably should)
> write the if statement as
>
>   if ext[1] in ('mp3', 'mp4', 'ogg', 'aac', 'wma'):
>
> but I really don't think that's your problem. Could you also post the
> output, too?
>
> In [1]:filelist = os.listdir('./')
>
> In [2]:for thefile in filelist:
>    ...:    if '.' in thefile:
>    ...:        ext = thefile.split('.')
>    ...:        ext[1] = ext[1].lower()
>    ...:        print ext[1]
>    ...:        if (ext[1] == 'mp3' or ext[1] == 'mp4' or ext[1] ==
> 'ogg' or ext[1] == 'aac' or ext[1] == 'wma'):
>    ...:            print 'We have a valid extension: %s' % ext[1]
>    ...:
> ogg
> We have a valid extension: ogg
> [etc.]
>
I dont know what the problem was, but before posting the output i replaced:

if (ext[1] == 'mp3' or ext[1] == 'mp4' or ext[1] == 'ogg' or ext[1] ==
'aac' or ext[1] == 'wma'):


with:

if ext[1] in ('mp3', 'mp4', 'ogg', 'aac', 'wma'):

And it worked perfectly, thanks for that tip. Not only does it work, but
it is less messy to look at.

And re. some other posts, yes the code is quite a hack, but once I get
it working i will resort to cleaning it up and stripping all the
unrequired blocks of code. Cheers everyone who helped! you made my life
easier :)