missing 'xor' Boolean operator

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Wed Jul 15 03:44:48 EDT 2009


On Jul 15, 5:07 am, "Dr. Phillip M. Feldman" <pfeld... at verizon.net>
wrote:
> I appreciate the effort that people have made, but I'm not impressed with any
> of the answers.  For one thing, xor should be able to accept an arbitrary
> number of input arguments (not just two), and should return True if and only
> if the number of input arguments that evaluate to True is odd.

Well, that's not exactly what you originally asked for.  But it's
still a one-liner:

def xor(*args): return bool(sum(map(bool, args)) % 2)

or perhaps

def xor(*args): return bool(len(filter(None, args)) & 1)

> Here's my code:
>
> def xor(*args):
>    """xor accepts an arbitrary number of input arguments, returning True
>    if and only if bool() evaluates to True for an odd number of the input
>    arguments."""
>
>    result= False
>
>    for arg in args:
>       if bool(arg): result= not result

It's more idiomatic to say "if arg: ..." rather than "if bool
(arg): ...".

>
>    return result

Mark



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