Re: [Pythonmac-SIG] Baffling if statement

[Bob Ippolito]

On Sep 22, 2005, at 3:34 PM, Kirk Durston wrote: After spending a couple hours trying to figure out what is going on, I’m asking for help. Below is a short segment from a module I’ve written. Before the part shown below, temp and Cutoff are defined. then comes the following:             blank='-'             if temp>Cutoff:                     print 'temp is', temp                 print 'cutoff is', Cutoff                 print 'symbol is', symbol                 InfoCollector.append(symbol)             else:InfoCollector.append(blank) the print out shows that temp=0.261 and Cutoff is 0.29498. Clearly temp is smaller than Cutoff, so it should have gone to ‘else:’ but it didn’t. In fact, no matter if temp is larger or smaller than Cutoff, it always goes through the ‘if’ segment. Sounds like you're comparing a float and a string.  Don't do that, make sure that temp and cutoff are both float if you expect a meaningful comparison. To convert a string to a float, use float(aString). To see the "programmer representation" of a variable, use the %r format string, or the repr() function.  E.g.: print 'temp is', repr(temp) or  print 'cutoff is %r' % (Cutoff,) Using programmer repr[esentations] for debugging is essential, the string representations of types can be (intentionally) ambiguous. One of the two is almost definitely a string, so you should do temp = float(temp) or similar. -bob

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