Navigation:

Else-if Condition

In the last exercise, we learned basic if-else conditions. If you need a quick refresher, you can review Conditional statements.

In this section, we’ll expand to introduce a new condition called “elif”.

Elif Condition

Elif Keyword represents the “else-if” condition. A real world example would be: If I am really hungry, I will eat a cake, else if I am only a little hungry, I will have an apple, else I won’t eat anything. You can see it is used when you want to try another condition if the first one is not true.

# This is the basic elif syntax
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 the first statement, 1 greater than 3, is false, it evaluates to false. The inside of the if statement will not be executed then. We will then evaluate the elif statement, 1 is equal to 3, which also evaluates to false. The inside of the elif will not be executed. 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