Ndtyjky

i'm fairly new to python so i'm sure i'm doing something wrong. i am defining a function which accepts a string variable. i can not be sure exactly what the variable will be, but there a are a 3 values i want to test for and just return a string if are values are found. if those values are not found, i simply want to return 'unknown'. here is my code:

def item_priority(cell_color):

  if cell_color == 'green' or 'yellow':

    return 'low'

  elif cell_color == 'red':

    return 'high'

  else:

    return 'unknown'

so then i try to execute:

>> item_priority('orange')

python returns:

'low'

the result i expected to see would be 'unknown'. even if i test with "item_priority('red')", it still returns 'low'. the only explanations i have found on this site so far involve code that is more complex than mine.

i have tried interchanging the second 'if' with 'elif' but my result is still the same. i'm not sure what i'm doing wrong here. any help is greatly appreciated. thanks!

'yellow' is always evaluating to True within the if-conditional, therefore that block of code is always being executed with whatever you pass in. You need to add or cell_color == 'yellow' to line 2

Put your values into an array - then test against that:

validColors = ["red", "black", "blue", "yellow"]

color = "red"



if color in validColors:

    print("Found it")

else:

    print("Not found")

Or, more in tune with your code:

def item_priority(cell_color):

  lowColors = ["green", "yellow"]

  highColors = ["red"]



  if cell_color in lowColors:

    return 'low'

  elif cell_color in highColors:

    return 'high'

  else:

    return 'unknown'

Dictionary approach:

def item_priority(cell_color):

  colors = {}

  colors["high"] = ["red"]

  colors["low"] = ["green", "yellow"]



  if cell_color in colors["low"]:

    return 'low'

  elif cell_color in colors["high"]:

    return 'high'

  else:

    return 'unknown'

def item_priority(cell_color):

    if cell_color == 'green' or cell_color == 'yellow' :

        return 'low'

    elif cell_color == 'red' :

        return 'high'

    else:

        return 'unknown'

item_priority('Orange')