Question

I have written a very basic encryption program, and whilst writing the decrypting algorithm for it, I have encountered some problems with a loop I have.

from re import *

cipher = open('cipher.txt')
ciphertext = cipher.read()
keyfile = open('key.txt')
key = keyfile.read()
decoded = []
chardec = ''
inval = 1

print("Decoder for encrypt1.py")
while inval == 1:
    useManKey = input("Use a manual key? Y or N\n> ")
    if useManKey == 'Y' or 'y':
        key = input("Please enter the key you wish to use to decrypt\n> ")
        inval = 0
    elif useManKey == 'N' or 'n':
        inval = 0
        print("OK, decrypting")
    else:
        print("That wasn't a valid option/nPlease re-enter")

When I run this, and declare useManKey as N or n it seems to run the if part of the loop as if I had declared it as Y or y. I am probably being stupid here, but any help would be much appreciated thanks.

Answer 1

useManKey == 'Y' or 'y' does not work how you think it does. What you want is useManKey in ('Y', 'y'). What you have first evaluates useManKey == 'Y', then, if that check fails, tests the string 'y' for truishness. Since non-empty strings are always truish, your if statement always evaluates to True. As is pointed out in the comments, you could also use upper() or lower() to first convert the input to a fixed case if you want.