🔒 Is this overkill? Code Simplification

[rotund epoch]

@sweet bison

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[naive heath]

A little.

It also has some bugs.

[eternal juniper]

I don't think it's overkill to be using regex to handle the prompt, but there's some other issues with the way it's structured

[naive heath]

I'd be just downcasing the response and testing value.strip().lower() in ('y', 'yes')

I wouldn't bother with the regexp.

It should just return True or False IMO, not a string.

Never use a bare except:, and if you're going to catch an exception (and ignore it!) at least print out what it was 🙁

[eternal juniper]

True, if you're having to double check the result against the expected prompts anyways, then you don't need the regex

[sweet bison]

sorry yall. discord was being dumb and double posted

Hiya everyone. I'm picking back up with python after not touching it for over 5 years. I'm relearning using forums and that such whilst forcing myself not to use AI. My question is such. Is the code below overkill for what I want it to do, or is this the most robust way to do this.

#reusable case-insensitive yes/y or no/n checker that returns a value of yes or no back
def yes_no(prompt):
    pattern = re.compile(r'\b(yes|no|y|n)\b', re.IGNORECASE)
    while True:
        try:
            value = pattern.search(input(prompt))
            value = value.group()
            if not value: #Returns if it receives no value or None as the value
                print("Invalid option. Please type Y(es)/N(o): ")
            else:
                if value.lower() == "yes" or "y":
                    return str("yes")
                elif value.lower() == "no" or "n":
                    return str("no")
        except:
            print("An unknown error occured. Please type Y(es)/N(o): ")

heres the origianly prompt

I dont know how to delete the other thread

[naive heath]

Closing it is enough. All good.

[naive heath]

We've seen other people do this. Sounds like discord's a bit silly.

[sweet bison]

phew! glad it wasn't just me. I'll adjust code accordingly.

[naive heath]

So, our comments above any help?

[sweet bison]

yea! I go a little overboard with regex because it only passes things through if it passes the test. I always forget that there are other ways to test things XD

[naive heath]

Regexps should almost always be a second choice. They're cryptic and brittle.

This is a bug: value.lower() == "yes" or "y"

!or-gotcha

[rotund epoch]

The or-gotcha

When checking if something is equal to one thing or another, you might think that this is possible:

# Incorrect...
if favorite_fruit == 'grapefruit' or 'lemon':
    print("That's a weird favorite fruit to have.")

While this makes sense in English, it may not behave the way you would expect. In Python, you should have complete instructions on both sides of the logical operator.

So, if you want to check if something is equal to one thing or another, there are two common ways:

# Like this...
if favorite_fruit == 'grapefruit' or favorite_fruit == 'lemon':
    print("That's a weird favorite fruit to have.")

# ...or like this.
if favorite_fruit in ['grapefruit', 'lemon']:
    print("That's a weird favorite fruit to have.")

[sweet bison]

thanks! i would have never known

[naive heath]

In short:

• fix that or bug
• drop the try/except entirely
• drop the regexp entirely
• return True or False
  would be my initiali recommendations.

[sweet bison]

if i drop the try/except will it still loop infinitely until y,yes,n,no is passed in as an input

[eternal juniper]

It's the return that's responsible for getting you out of this loop. The try/except has nothing to do with it

[sweet bison]

got it!

[eternal juniper]

a simple "if valid response, return" will be just fine

[naive heath]

Sure. Is that unwanted?

Basicly this function:

• loops until it gets yes or no
• should return True for yes and False for no

try/except is for catching specific expected failures. You haven't got any of those here.

[sweet bison]

Better?

def yes_no(prompt):
    while True:
        value = input(prompt)
        if value.strip().lower() in ('y', 'yes'):
            return True
        elif value.strip().lower() in ('n', 'no'):
            return False
        else:
            print("Invalid option. Please type Y(es)/N(o): ")

[naive heath]

(we all write one of these at some point. I usually call mine ask.)

[naive heath]

You could shorten it slightly:

def yes_no(prompt):
    while True:
        value = input(prompt)
        if value.strip().lower() in ('y', 'yes'):
            return True
        if value.strip().lower() in ('n', 'no'):
            return False
        print("Invalid option. Please type Y(es)/N(o): ")

A stylistic choice, not a criticism.

since control returns from the function at return and doesn't continue past that you don't need the "else" stuff.

[sweet bison]

does it functionally parse faster like this if you were to use a timer module, or is it just a stylistic choice?

[naive heath]

Just style. There shouldn't be any timing changes at all, quite possibly.

Need to go AFK for a while.

[sweet bison]

I think ill leave it as is for my sake. I'll clean things up as I learn more!

[rotund epoch]

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