Using Python Conditional Expressions

Our first conditional statement checks the length of the name passed in and prints a different message depending on that length. We've been tasked with writing a conditional expression that calls one of these print functions if true and the other if false.

process_name.py

name = input("What is your first name? ")

# 1) Call `print` with a different string using a single conditional expression
# 1) Call `print` with a different string using a single conditional expression
print(
    "Your name is as long or longer than the average first name in the United States"
) if len(name) >= 6 else print(
    "Your name is shorter than the average first name in the United States"
)

These messages are pretty long, so it makes it easier to read if we spread this expression across multiple lines. However, we are still running only one expression.

Each branch for our next conditional statement assigns a value to the message variable. Because of this, we can assign the value returned by a conditional expression directly to the message variable.

process_name.py

# 2) Set `message` using a single conditional expression
message = (
    "The first letter in your name is among the five most common"
    if name[0].lower() in ["a", "j", "m", "e", "l"]
    else "The first letter of your name is not among the five most common"
)

print(message)

The strings that we might assign to message are fairly long, but we can spread this expression across multiple lines by wrapping the entire expression in parenthesis.

We want to change the string that is printed as we iterate over all of the letters in our name variable. The portion of the printed message that is different based on the letter is at the end. We can utilize a conditional expression from within the print function instead of having two separate print lines.

process_name.py

# 3) Change the string passed to the `print` function using a conditional expression
for letter in name:
    print(
        f"{letter} {'is a vowel' if letter.lower() in ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u'] else 'is a consonant'}"
    )