Question

I’ve heard that it is possible to substitute an if statement by using a lambda.

Is this possible in Python? If so, how?

Answer 1

Like the others, I’m not sure what you’re asking about, but I’m willing to have a guess.

I sometimes use lambdas in a bit of a hacky way processing results from API calls.

Say for example an element of an API call result should be a numeric string which I’d want as an integer, but occasionally it returns something else.

You could defined a lambda to turn a string into an integer if it is comprised of digits:

lambda x: x and x.isdigit() and int(x) or None

This is avoiding an if statement, but not because of the lambda, you could do the same as a function:

def f(x):
  return x and x.isdigit() and int(x) or None

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Update

Less buggy hack, courtesy of Paul McGuire:

lambda x: int(x) if x and x.isdigit() else None

i.e. as int('0') returns an equivalent of False the lambda might surprise you by returning None when you wanted 0