[FIXED] python: simplify return statement (trigraph?)

Issue

Consider the following simple code:

import re

def my_match(s):
    if re.match("^[a-zA-Z]+", s):
         return True
    else:
         return False

Is there a way to collapse this in a single return statement? In C we could do for example:

return match("^[a-zA-Z]+", s) ? true : false;

Is there something similar in python?

Solution

Python also supports this, although the syntaxes is a little different than most languages.

import re

def my_match(s):
    return True if re.match("^[a-zA-Z]+", s) else False

In general, the Python syntax is val_when_true if cond else val_when_false, compared to the cond ? val_when_true : val_when_false you see in other languages.

In your particular case though, you can just write:

import re

def my_match(s):
    return bool(re.match("^[a-zA-Z]+", s))

Answered By - CoffeeTableEspresso