Question

In my textbook I came across this example:

lower = (lambda x, y: x if x < y else y)
print(lower ('bb','aa'))

So far I used

if_stmt ::=  "if" expression ":" suite
         ( "elif" expression ":" suite )*
         ["else" ":" suite]

So, this ‘x if x < y else y’ astonished me a bit.
Could you direct me: where in the documentation can I find this construction?

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

So they are called “Conditional Expressions” and you can find them in the python 3 docs a longer clearer explanation can be found in this section of of the 2.5 docs. I use it a lot for conditional assignment like:

level = 1 if logging else 0