Else-if Condition

We have already learned some basic if-else conditions from previous workshops, click on the link below if you want to review.

• Conditional statements

We will introduce a new condition called “elif”.

Elif Condition

Elif Keyword represents the “else-if” condition. It is used when you want to have if the last if condition is not true, try this condition.

# This is my first line of code
if expression:
    statement(s)
elif expression:
    statement(s)
else:
    statement(s)

Let’s see an example

# This is an example
if 1 > 3:
    print('1>3')
elif 1 == 3:
    print('1=3')
else:
    print('1<3')

Since we can see that 1 greater than 3 is false, so it evaluates to false. The inside of the if statement will not be executed then. Since last if statement is false, we will then evaluate the elif statement if 1 is equal to 3, so it evaluates to false. So what is in else will be printed.

Warning: elif is different from if

Let’s see two examples

Example A

# This is Example A of two if statements
if 1 == 1:
    print('1=1')
if 3 == 3:
    print('3=3')
else:
    print('wrong')

Example A will print out:
1=1
3=3

Example B

# This is Example of elif statements
if 1 == 1:
    print('1=1')
elif 3 == 3:
    print('3=3')
else:
    print('wrong')

Example B will print out:
1=1

In Example A we will evaluate the first if statement (1==1) to be true. The inside of first if statement will be executed then. We will then evaluate second if statement (3==3) to be true as well. The inside of second if statement will also be executed.
In Example B we will evaluate the first if statement (1==1) to be true. Then the rest part of elif and else will not be evaluated since if is already correct.

Challenge

Can you utilize the knowledge you learnt in Python-Basics-booleans to make your own example for elif? You may want to review boolean to finish this challenge.

• Booleans