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Python Python Basics Functions and Looping Raising Exceptions

Accounting for other potential user errors:

I ran into a few other potential user errors and I did my best to account for them. Was there a better way to handle either of these?

User Error #1: The user enters a dollar sign ($) as a part of their answer to question 1. In this case, the float function is unable to coerce the string and an error is returned.

I solved this by adding some additional code:

total_due = (input("What is the total?    "))
total_due = float(total_due.replace('$', '')
total_due = float(total_due)

Essentially I told the script to replace any dollar signs with an empty character, removing them, and then I converted this new dollar-sign-less value to a float. I could combine them all into one line but I thought it looked cleaner and clearer this way.

User Error #2: The user answers question #2 (how many people?) as a string. The way the code is written by the end of the video, "too much" will display this error message back to us:

(could not convert string to float: 'too much')   

Which might be confusing for the user. Even more confusing is if we say something like "20 people":

(invalid literal for int() with base 10: '20 people')

My solution to this was to establish a new variable (show_err) at the top of my code as False by default:

import math

show_err = False

Then I branched the Value Error exception code:

except ValueError as err:
    print("Oh no! That's not a valid value. Try again...")
    if show_err == True:
        print("({})".format(err))
    else:
        print("(Please type value as a number.)")

Now we retain the original messaging for if a number less than or equal to 1 is entered, and in all other cases we are told to type the value as a number. (I used number as a colloquial instead of integer but there is still probably a better way to phrase this.)

I can't think of any other ways you could format your input for question 2 incorrectly so I believe this works. This was all the result of trial and error and my own research so please let me know if there is a more elegant solution!

1 Answer

Steven Parker
Steven Parker
231,261 Points

When does "show_err" get set to True?

Also, you never need to compare a boolean value to "True", you can simply name it:

    if show_err: