Why is "No" as raw_input in the following python code returning TRUE?

Question

I cannot for the life of me understand why I can't get to the "else" statement no matter what I type. Any insight would be much appreciated. Am I not allowed to use more than one "or"?

print "Do you want to go down the tunnel? "

tunnel = raw_input ("> ")

if tunnel == "Y" or "Yes" or "Yea" or "Si" or "go" or "Aye" or "Sure":
    print "You found the gold."
else:
    print "Wrong answer, you should have gone down the tunnel. There was gold down there."

Answer 1

Because in python

if tunnel == "Y" or "Yes" or "Yea" or "Si" or "go" or "Aye" or "Sure":

is equivalent to

if (tunnel == "Y") or ("Yes") or ("Yea") or ("Si") or ("go") or ("Aye") or ("Sure"):

and a nonempty string is true.

You should change your code to

if tunnel in ("Y", "Yes", "Yea", "Si", "go", "Aye", "Sure"):

or, to accept variations in capitalization:

if tunnel.lower() in ("y", "yes", "yea", "si", "go", "aye", "sure"):

or maybe even use a regex.

In Python 2.7 and more, you can even use sets, which are fasters than tuples when using in.

if tunnel.lower() in {"y", "yes", "yea", "si", "go", "aye", "sure"}:

But you really will get the perf boost from python 3.2 and above, since before the implementation of sets litterals is not as optimised as tuples ones.