Stop Using “or” to Check Multiple Conditions in Python

There is a more sophisticated solution

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

We all are familiar with using these 2 lines to check whether a variable satisfies one or multiple equalities.

Nothing is more natural than coding this way, i.e., separating each condition with or logical operator. But that is not the whole story.

As I said at the beginning of the article, there is a sophisticated solution. This can be also a better solution, or not. It depends on your aspect and how you define ‘better’. I’ll give a couple of approaches, and we’ll analyze their strengths and weaknesses.

“in” operator in Python

The in keyword essentially has two usages in Python:

1: To iterate through a sequence:

Example:

Result:

winter
spring
summer
autumn

2: To check if a value exists in a sequence (string, tuple, list, etc.) or not. According to the existence of a value, it returns True or False .

Example 1:

Result:

True
False

Example 2:

Now let’s take a look at the subtitle of this section: