Less than Or Greater Than Comparison as a Variable in Python

Question

I have a block of code in a function that does some comparisons, namely:

if customer_info['total_dls'] < min_training_actions \
or customer_info['percentage'] > train_perc_cutoff:
    continue
elif customer_id not in test_set \
or test_set[customer_id]['total_dls'] < min_testing_actions:
    num_uncertain +=1
    continue
elif test_set[customer_id]['percentage'] <= test_perc_cutoff:
    num_correct +=1
else:
    num_incorrect +=1

Now sometimes I need to do those comparisons to be greater than, and sometimes I need them to be less than. All of the rest of the code is exactly the same. Now, I could just make two functions that reuse basically the same code, but before I do, is there some clean way to variabalize the comparison operator, so I could just use the same block of code and pass in the comparison as a variable? Something like: compare(var1, var2, polarity). I know I can make this myself, but I'm wondering what the standard is in cases like this. Is there some pretty pythonic way of doing this I'm unaware of?

[Edit] Adding emphasis to the most important part of the question [/Edit]

Answer 1

You can use the operator module; it has functions that act as the comparison operators:

import operator

if foobar:
    comp = operator.lt
else:
    comp = operator.gt

if comp(spam, eggs):

This'll use either test if spam is less then, or greater then eggs, depending on the truth of foobar.

This fits your comparison as a variable requirement exactly.

This is certainly what I'd use to avoid repeating myself; if you have two pieces of code that differ only in the comparison direction, use a function from operators to parameterize the comparison.

Answer 2

I had the same question when trying to build a module for unknown ML models. Some require a minimum score to perform, others a maximum score, depending on the metric used. I passed in a 'greater than' boolean variable and wrote a small function:

def is_better(gt,a,b): 
    return a>b if gt else a<b