Question

if month == 1 or 10:
    month1 = 0
if month == 2 or 3 or 11:
    month1 = 3
if month == 4 or 7:
    month1 = 6
if month == 5:
    month1 = 1
if month == 6:
    month1 = 4
if month == 8:
    month1 = 2
if month == 9 or 12:
    month1 = 5

This code always returns month1 equal to 5. I’m quite new at programming, what am I doing wrong? (I guess it involves the fact that 12 is the highest number, but == means equals right?)

Answer 1

EDIT: I first gave the wrong reason why this is not working. As others have pointed out,

if month == 1 or 10:
    # ...

is equivalent to

if (month == 1) or 10:
    # ...

So ... always gets executed.

You could use

if month in (1, 10):
    month1 = 0

or even better

a = [0, 3, 3, 6, 1, 4, 6, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5]
month1 = a[month - 1]

or

d = {1: 0, 2: 3, 3: 3, 4: 6, 5: 1, 6: 4,
     7: 6, 8: 2, 9: 5, 10: 0, 11: 3, 12: 5}
month1 = d[month]

instead.

Yet another way of getting the same result would be to use the datetime module:

from datetime import datetime
month1 = (datetime(2011, month, 1) - datetime(2011, 1, 1)).days % 7