Very, very simple question here. How would I modify a variable through a function? I feel really dumb for asking this. Here's what I have:
enemyHealth = 100
def Attack():
enemyHealth -= 10
Apparently, enemyHealth is not defined.
I would expect that you wouldn't need to return anything. What am I doing wrong?
One way is to make it global, but that's a really bad sign. It makes it difficult to develop and debug functions, as you need to know about the global state to do so.
The simple way to avoid it is to pass values around:
enemy_health = 100
def attack(health, power=10):
return health - power
enemy_health = attack(enemy_health)
print(enemy_health)
But it looks like you could use OOP here:
class Enemy:
def __init__(self):
self.health = 100
def attack(character, power=10):
character.health -= power
enemy = Enemy() # create Enemy instance
attack(enemy) # attack it
print(enemy.health) # see the result
Short answer:
enemyHealth = 100
def Attack():
global enemyHealth
enemyHealth -= 10
global. Using global leads to inflexible and unmaintainable code. In other words: do not do what this answer suggests.
globalif you want to modify it within a function. See here. But realistically, this is rarely the best solution--you'd more likely want an instance of someEnemyclass, with its ownhealthattribute for you to modify. See this answer for an explanation/example.