Try and except problem. I'm trying to write a function that outputs only a letter; an alphabetic letter.

Appreciated, thanks John. That's what I'm after. Would you happen to know how I could write this using 'Try and except?' Or would that really not make sense here? I know if I was checking for an integer as an output from the input() function I could include an 'except ValueError' to catch none int.'s. In other words, can I use try /except to catch none alphabetic values coming from input()?

Thanks

You're welcome. I'm not sure how to add try/except in this case to be used to test if the input is a single letter. Like you said you would need it if you were converting the input to a number, but input returns a string and we are just testing to see if they gave us a single letter (it says a letter in the original question so I'm assuming it is one letter you are wanting from the user). isalpha() returns True or False depending on if the contents of the variable are letters or not, so this will not crash the program and activate the except block if someone inputs a number (just False will be returned instead). I tried a few things and couldn't think of a way to make it crash without the try/except blocks. If you want the extra exception handling though you could do the following. Instead of crashing (if someone found a way), it would gather the description of the Exception and print it to the terminal/console and then rerun the function. I also added an additional test for the input to make sure that it is one character, but you can remove this if that's not the case. There probably is a way to implement the try/except the closer to the way you want, but I'm not sure (and this should do just fine).

def guess():
    try:
        while True:
            user_guess = input('Choose a single letter: ')
            if user_guess.isalpha() and len(user_guess) == 1:    # remove this if the input is allowed to be more than one character
                print(user_guess)
                break
            else:
                print('You must enter a single letter')
        return user_guess
    except Exception as e:     # this will catch any exceptions called during execution of the function
        print(e)                         # prints the error message
        guess()                         # reruns the function

guess()

Hi John, Good day to you. In your 2nd code with TRY / EXCEPT, why did you call the guess() function twice? Regards

Thankyou

Click on the markdown cheatsheet link below the editor window for details. :)

You want to use three backticks and the word "python" on the first line, then three backticks on the last line to format your code.

Just keep in mind that any exception handling (try/except in python, try/catch in many other languages) is something you should typically use when there are factors outside of your control (file i/o, network connections, etc)

In the case of collecting user input from the console, which is always going to be a string, and all you really have to do is determine if it's a single character and whether or not it's a letter, you've got no real reason to worry that you'd get an exception anyway.

In fact, in a case like that, you'd probably almost want it to throw an unhandled exception and draw attention to it right away, as it probably indicates a bigger problem you'd want to fix in your code.

I think later on in the course you'll run into a try/except situation where you're converting strings to integers or some other data type. There, you'll want handle an exception because it's likely a user could enter the wrong information, or information that (like a string that should represent a number, but might contain a typo or letter, that wouldn't get cast to an int) In cases like that, you'd want to use try/except because it's very possible to get that ValueError or TypeError or whatever, and you'll want to handle that smoothly.