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Following that, an if...else statement is used to decide whether to visit the museum or to go to the beach based on the weather. Note the use of the equality operator ( == ) in the conditional clause of the if statement. Also note that the corresponding working variable ( rain or sunshine ) is set to True to confirm the visit for the benefit of the conditional clause of the while loop.
When the museum and the beach have each been visited at least once, the while loop will terminate causing the "go home" print statement to be executed.
Because of the use of a random number generator to control the weather, this program will produce a different output each time you run it. Figure 5 shows the output from one such run.
Figure 5 . Output from the code in Listing 2. |
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Sunshine, go to the beach.
Sunshine, go to the beach.Sunshine, go to the beach.
It's raining, visit the museum.Vacation is over, go home. |
In this case, the random number generator produced the following sequence of numbers: 0,0,0,1 causing the beach to be visited three times before thevisit to the museum.
I recommend that you create a visualization on your own for the code in Listing 2 and step through the program one instruction at a time. Once again, as you do that, pay attention to themovements of the red and green arrows on the left, the diagram on the right, and the printed material at the bottom. That should help you to better understandthe behavior of an if...else statement.
There are three keywords that can be used with nested if statements:
You already know about if and else . The keyword elif is short for "else if" . Nested if statements can contain zero or more elif parts and the else part is optional.
The if...else construct allows the program to choose between two options. The use of elif makes it possible to write code that can choose among three or more options.
The program shown in Listing 3 extends the vacation analogy to three options:
Once again, you won't go home until you have at least one opportunity to do each of the three activities in the above list.
Listing 3 . Example of nested if statements. |
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# Illustrates nested if statements
#---------------------------------import random
weather = ["sunshine","rain","snow"]rain = False
sunshine = Falsesnow = False
# Loop until rain and sunshine and snow are all truewhile (rain == False or sunshine == False or snow == False):
# Get today's weatherweatherToday = weather[random.randint(0,2)]
if weatherToday == "rain":rain = True
print("It's raining, visit the museum.")elif weatherToday == "sunshine":
sunshine = Trueprint("Sunshine, go to the beach.")
else:snow = True
print("It's snowing, go skiing.")print("Vacation is over, go home.") |
The key thing to note in Listing 3 is the elif after the if and before the else . This extends the choices from two as shown in Listing 2 to three. The number of choices could be extended to more than three by inserting more elif options.
As before, the output will be different each time you run the program. One such output is shown in Figure 6 .
Figure 6 . Output from the code in Listing 3. |
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It's snowing, go skiing.
It's raining, visit the museum.It's snowing, go skiing.
It's raining, visit the museum.It's raining, visit the museum.
It's raining, visit the museum.It's snowing, go skiing.
Sunshine, go to the beach.Vacation is over, go home. |
You should be able to compare the output with the code in Listing 3 and determine the sequence of eight random numbers produced by the random numbergenerator in this case.
Once again I recommend that you create a visualization on your own for the code in Listing 3 and step through the program one instruction at a time. As you do that, pay attention to themovements of the red and green arrows on the left, the diagram on the right, and the printed material at the bottom. That should help you to better understandthe behavior of nested if statements.
I encourage you to copy the code from Listing 1 , Listing 2 , and Listing 3 . Execute the code and confirm that you get the same results as those shown in Figure 2 , Figure 5 , and Figure 6 . Experiment with the code, making changes, and observing the results of your changes. Make certain that youcan explain why your changes behave as they do.
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