Question

sorry if this is an obvious question, but I am relatively new to python and am completely stumped at the moment. I am having difficulty getting my variables to work the way I want them too in a program I am working on.

Here is an example I quickly made to showcase my problem:

life = 200

def example(dudeHP):
    dudeHP = dudeHP - 75
    print (dudeHP)

example(life)
print (life) #output is 200, but I want it to be 125

As you can see, I am trying to get the value of the global variable “life” to change inside the def example codeblock with dudeHP (which would be a local variable if I am not mistaken?)

Is this viable? Is there a better way to accomplish this? Or am I doing it all wrong? Thankyou in advance 🙂

Answer 1

Well, first of all, you’ll probably want to write an class or something to organize all this at some point. Modifying global variables from within functions or methods is usually considered a bad idea.

What you might want to try is this:

life = 200

def example(x):
    return x - 75

life = example(life)

Of course in this case the operation of subtraction is so trivial that you don’t need to encapsulate it in a function.