Question

I’m creating a text based adventure game. The character is navigating a map made up of city blocks. I have a direction_function that takes raw_input and then moves the character to the correct adjacent block. However, I have special features, like items to pick up or people to interact with on most blocks. Here I use raw_input as well. If they enter the right keyword they interact, but if they ignore them by entering a direction, it passes them into the direction_function which prompts them for raw_input again. Is there a way to pass their initial answer into the direction_function so they don’t have to repeat their answer?

here’s my direction_function:

def direction_function(left, right, up, down, re):
    direc = raw_input(">")
    if direc in west:
        left()
    elif direc in east:
        right()
    elif direc in north:
        up()
    elif direc in south:
        down()
    elif direc in inventory_list:
        inventory_check()
        re()
    else:
        print "try again"
        re()

I designate a function for each block like this

def block3_0():
    print "You see a bike lying in your neighbor's yard. Not much else of interest."
    direc = raw_input(">")
    if direc in ("take bike", "steal bike", "ride bike", "borrow bike", "use bike"):
        print "\n"
        bike.remove("bike")
        school_route()
    else:
        direction_function(block2_0, block4_0, block3_1, block3_0, block3_0)

Answer 1

Well, you can use a default argument value on your direction_function to pass the result of an eventual previous call to raw_input, such as:

def direction_function(direction=None):
    direction = direction or raw_input()
    # Do something with the input

If no direction is provided (regular workflow), the test will end up calling raw_input to get some. If a direction is provided (like the one you’ll pass if you already read one), it will directly be used.