How to test that variable is not equal to multiple things?

Question

This is the piece of code I have:

choice = ""

while choice != "1" and choice != "2" and choice != "3": 
    choice = raw_input("pick 1, 2 or 3")

    if choice == "1":
        print "1 it is!"

    elif choice == "2":
        print "2 it is!"

    elif choice == "3":
        print "3 it is!"

    else:
        print "You should choose 1, 2 or 3"

While it works, I feel that it's really clumsy, specifically the while clause. What if I have more acceptable choices? Is there a better way to make the clause?

Answer 1

The while bit could be refactored a little to make it a little bit cleaner by checking if the element is within a list of choices like so

while choice not in [1, 2, 3]:

This is checking if the value of choice is not an element in that list