noob question Letters in words?

[Rob Cowie]

A string can be thought of as a tuple of characters. Tuples support
membership testing thus...

choice1 = raw_input("> ")

if '1' or 's' or 'S' in choice1:
  #do something
elif '2' or 'e' or E' in choice1:
  #do something

It doesn't seem to me to be a good idea; If the input is 'Start',
option1 is executed, likewise if the input is 'Stop', or any other
string with 's' in it.

Perhaps a better idea is to present the user with a choice that cannot
be deviated from, along the lines of...

def main():
  print "1.\tStart"
  print "2.\tSomething Else"
  print "3.\tStop"

  x = raw_input()
  if x is '1': print 'Start'
  elif x is '2': print 'Something else'
  elif x is '3': print 'End'
  else: main()