Python If, Else and Elif Conditional Statements

In the last tutorial, we studied about the logical and relational expressions and tried to understand their usage with help of various examples. We also saw examples about how multiple relational expressions can be put together with the help of logical operators to create meaningful logical expressions.

We also mentioned how these logical and relational expressions can be used to control the flow of execution.

In this section, we will learn some more ways to control the flow of execution. In programming, there are two ways to achieve this, and they are known as conditional statements and looping.

In this tutorial, we will be discussing about the conditional statements, so let's begin.

Conditional Statements

There will be various situations while writing a program when you will have to take care of different possible conditions that might arise while execution of the program. In such situations, if conditions can be used.

The if condition

Syntax for using the if keyword is as follows:

if [conditional expression]:
	[statement(s) to execute]

if keyword and the conditional expression is ended with a colon. In [conditional expression] some conditional expression is introduced that is supposed to return a boolean value, i.e., True or False. If the resulting value is True then the [statement to execute] is executed, which is mentioned below the if condition with a tabspace(This indentation is very important).

Taking a real-life example, let's say in a savings bank account a user A, has Rs.1000. The user A, visits the ATM to withdraw money from his savings account. Now the program which handles the ATM transactions should be able to perform in every situation, like the program should be aware of the user's bank account balance, and should not allow the user to withdraw money more than the available balance in his account. Also, the program must update the account balance once the user has withdrawn money from the account, to keep the records updated. Let's write a small piece of code to stop user from withdrawing money more than the available account balance.

>>> savingAmt = 1000
>>> withdrawAmt = int(input("Amount to Withdraw: "));
>>> if withdrawAmt > savingAmt:
	    print ("Insufficient balance");

Amount to Withdraw: 2000 Insufficient balance

In the above program if the user enters any amount more than Rs. 1000, a message is displayed on the screen saying "Insufficient Funds".

There are two more keywords that are optional, but can be accompanied with if statements, the are:

• else
• elif (also known as else if)

The else condition

Talking about else, let's first see how it is used alongside the if statement.

if[conditional expression]:
	[statement to execute]
else:
	[alternate statement to execute]

Continuing with the bank account-ATM example, if you noticed in the program above, we forgot to subtract the withdrawn amount from the savings account balance. Since now we have an additional else condition to use, we can print a warning with the message, "Insufficient balance" if the saving amount is less than the withdraw amount, or else we can subtract the withdrawn amount from the savings account amount to update the account balance. So the if condition written in the previous example, will get an additional else block.

if withdrawAmt > savingAmt:
	print ("Insufficient balance");
else:
	savingAmt = savingAmt - withdrawAmt
	print ("Account Balance:" + str(savingAmt));

And with the else block introduced, in case there is sufficient balance, the withdrawAmt will be subtracted from the savingAmt and the updated account balance will be displayed on screen.

With if and else, now we can diverge the flow of execution into two different directions. In case of a savings account, there will be only two cases, you have sufficient money or you don't, but what if we come across some situation where there are more than two possibilities? In such cases, we use yet another statement that is accompanied with the if and else statements, called elif (or else if in proper English).

The elif condition

elif statement is added between if and else blocks.

if[condition #1]:
	[statement #1]
elif[condition #2]:
	[statement #2]
elif[condition #3]:
	[statement #3]
else:
	[statement when if and elif(s) are False]

With this, you can add as many elif blocks as you want depending upon the possibilities that may arise.

Let's say you are given a time and you have to tell what phase of the day it is- (morning, noon, afternoon, evening or night). You will have to check the given time against multiple ranges of time within which each of the 5 phases lies. Therefore, the following conditions:

1. Morning: 0600 to 1159
2. Noon: 1200
3. Afternoon: 1201 to 1700
4. Evening: 1701 to 2000
5. Night: 2000 to 0559

Below we have a simple program, using the if, elif and else conditional statements:

if (time >= 600) and (time < 1200):
	print ("Morning");
elif (time == 1200):
	print ("Noon");
elif (time > 1200) and (time <= 1700):
	print ("Afternoon");
elif (time > 1700) and (time <= 2000):
	print ("Evening");
elif ((time > 2000) and (time < 2400)) or ((time >= 0) and (time < 600)):
	print ("Night");
else:
	print ("Invalid time!");

Notice the logical operators that have been used in each condition in the program, this example demonstrates how you will generally be using them with if-else statements.

Nesting if-else statements

Simply put, nesting if else means that you will be writing if-else statements inside another if-else statements. Syntactically,

if[condition #1]:
	if[condition #1.1]:
		[statement to exec if #1 and #1.1 are true]
	else:
		[statement to exec if #1 and #1.1 are false]
else:
	[alternate statement to execute]

Needless to say you can write the same if-else block inside an else block too. Or in fact you can add an elif condition, according to your needs. Although if you think about it, nested if-else is actually an alternative to elif. And just like we created a program which printed the phase of the day by checking the range of time, that can be done without using elif as well, by nesting if and else only.

if (time >= 600) and (time < 1200):
	print ("Morning");
else:
	if (time == 1200):
		print ("Noon");
	else:
		if (time > 1200) and (time <= 1700):
			print ("Afternoon");
		else:
			if (time > 1700) and (time <= 2000):
				print ("Evening");
			else:
				if ((time > 2000) and (time < 2400)) or ((time >= 0) and (time < 600)):
					print ("Night");
				else:
					print ("Invalid time!");

As you can see in the above program, all we did was, we started by adding a condition to the if block, and then used another if-else block in its else block. And we kept on doing the nesting until all the conditions were taken care of. This, however, is a little tedious than using elif. However, that's not all it is about. Nesting is very useful in various other situations, and in some cases, it's the only way forward.

Also, if you remember our first example while explaining the if statement, the savings bank account example. There is actually a quicker way to do it, a one-line way because, it's python. The following is the logic:

if (saving > withdraw) then saving = (saving - withdraw), else saving will remain as it is and there will be no transaction.

>>> savingAmt = savingAmt - withdrawAmt if (savingAmt > withdrawAmt) else savingAmt