How to use boolean 'and' in Python [duplicate]

Question

Try this:

i = 5
ii = 10
if i == 5 and ii == 10:
      print "i is 5 and ii is 10"

Edit: Oh, and you dont need that semicolon on the last line (edit to remove it from my code).

As pointed out, "&" in python performs a bitwise and operation, just as it does in C#. and is the appropriate equivalent to the && operator.

Since we're dealing with booleans (i == 5 is True and ii == 10 is also True), you may wonder why this didn't either work anyway (True being treated as an integer quantity should still mean True & True is a True value), or throw an exception (eg. by forbidding bitwise operations on boolean types)

The reason is operator precedence. The "and" operator binds more loosely than ==, so the expression: "i==5 and ii==10" is equivalent to: "(i==5) and (ii==10)"

However, bitwise & has a higher precedence than "==" (since you wouldn't want expressions like "a & 0xff == ch" to mean "a & (0xff == ch)"), so the expression would actually be interpreted as:

if i == (5 & ii) == 10:

Which is using python's operator chaining to mean: does the valuee of ii anded with 5 equal both i and 10. Obviously this will never be true.

You would actually get (seemingly) the right answer if you had included brackets to force the precedence, so:

if (i==5) & (ii=10)

would cause the statement to be printed. It's the wrong thing to do, however - "&" has many different semantics to "and" - (precedence, short-cirtuiting, behaviour with integer arguments etc), so it's fortunate that you caught this here rather than being fooled till it produced less obvious bugs.

The correct operator to be used are the keywords 'or' and 'and', which in your example, the correct way to express this would be:

if i == 5 and ii == 10:
    print "i is 5 and ii is 10"

You can refer the details in the "Boolean Operations" section in the language reference.

You can also test them as a couple.

if (i,ii)==(5,10):
    print "i is 5 and ii is 10"

& is used for bit-wise comparison. use and instead. and btw, you don't need semicolon at the end of print statement.

In python, use and instead of && like this:

#!/usr/bin/python
foo = True;
bar = True;
if foo and bar:
    print "both are true";

This prints:

both are true