Question

Sorry…I’m kind of a programming noob. I was looking at some problem sets online and I found THIS ONE. I wrote this much:

import random

powerball=random.randint(1,42)

a=random.randint(1,53)
b=random.randint(1,53)
c=random.randint(1,53)
d=random.randint(1,53)
e=random.randint(1,53)

(f,g,h,i,j)=x=input("Your 5 Chosen Numbers:")

My problem is that I don’t know how to make the program print something like “Please enter 5 numbers separated by only a comma” if more or less than five are entered. Also how would I do that if I wanted it to display a different message every other time they made that mistake?

Answer 1

Try this approach:

input_is_valid = False
while not input_is_valid:
    comma_separated_numbers = raw_input("Please enter a list of 5 numbers,separated by commas: ")
    numbers = [int(x.strip()) for x in comma_separated_numbers.split(",")]
    if len(numbers) != 5:
        print "Please enter exactly 5 numbers"
    else:
        input_is_valid = True