Question

How do you get the logical xor of two variables in Python?

For example, I have two variables that I expect to be strings. I want to test that only one of them contains a True value (is not None or an empty string):

str1 = raw_input("Enter string one:") str2 = raw_input("Enter string two:") if logical_xor(str1, str2):     print "ok" else:     print "bad" 

The ^ operator is bitwise, and not defined on all objects:

>>> 1 ^ 1 0 >>> 2 ^ 1 3 >>> "abc" ^ "" Traceback (most recent call last):   File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'str' and 'str' 

Answer 1

If you’re already normalizing the inputs to booleans, then != is xor.

bool(a) != bool(b)