How to make a while loop exit when user enters a certain string?

Question

I am making a survey that asks the user about age, gender, etc., using a while-loop. Is there any way to make the program exit the loop when the user enters certain strings like "cya" or "bye"?

I know that I could make an if-statement after every input, but is there an faster/easier way to do this?

Example of what I want to achieve:

while (user has not entered "cya"):
    age = int(input("How old? "))
    gender = input("gender? ")

EDIT: this example was very short, but the survey i'm making is very long, so testing every variable is too time consuming.

icedtrees · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-11 09:40:13Z

1

I think the easiest way to perform a survey is to construct a list of all your questions, and then use that to make a dictionary of all your user details.

details = {}
questions = [("gender", "What is your gender?"), ("age", "How old?"), ("name", "What is your name?")]
response = ""
while response not in ("bye", "cya"):
    for detail, question in questions:
        response = input(question)
        if response in ("bye", "cya"):
            break
        details[detail] = response
    print(details)

Example:

What is your gender?M
How old?5 
What is your name?john
{'gender': 'M', 'age': '5', 'name': 'john'}

What is your gender?m
How old?bye
{'gender': 'm'}

edited Oct 11, 2014 at 9:40

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 8:20

icedtrees

6,5466 gold badges28 silver badges35 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

3 Comments

Ali Mustafa Over a year ago

But is there a way to do this with a while-loop?

icedtrees Over a year ago

I put up an example of using a while loop. However, it is more complex than the other version, so I highly recommend using the for loop.

Ali Mustafa Over a year ago

Thanks, but when I run your code, the it doesn't loop. It just stops after asking the set of questions once?

kyrre · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-10 08:10:33Z

0

It's not a good idea, but one way to achieve what you want is to throw an exception to get out of the loop.

    def wrap_input(prompt, exit_condition):
        x = raw_input(prompt)
        if x == exit_condition:
            raise Exception
        return x

    try:
        while True:
            age = int(wrap_input("gender ", "cya"))
    except Exception:
        pass

Edit: If you don't need to exit immediately then a cleaner approach is to provide your own input function which stores all input in a set which can then be checked/reset at each iteration.

edited Oct 10, 2014 at 8:10

answered Oct 10, 2014 at 7:58

kyrre

6462 gold badges9 silver badges24 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to make a while loop exit when user enters a certain string?

2 Answers 2

3 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

2 Answers 2

3 Comments

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related