Question

I’ll preface with, this is solely to satisfy my curiosity rather than needing help on a coding project. But I was wanting to know if anyone knows of a function (particularly in python, but I’ll accept a valid mathematical concept) kind of like absolute value, that given a number will return 0 if negative or return that number if positive.

Pseudo code:

def myFunc(x):
    if x > 0:
        return x
    else:
        return 0

Again, not asking the question out of complexity, just curiosity. I’ve needed it a couple times now, and was wondering if I really did need to write my own function or if one already existed. If there isn’t a function to do this, is there a way to write this in one line using an expression doesn’t evaluate twice.

i.e.

myVar = x-y if x-y>0 else 0

I’d be fine with a solution like that if x-y wasn’t evaluated twice. So if anyone out there has any solution, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks

Answer 1

One way…

>>> max(0, x)