Returning Boolean Values

00:00 In this lesson, we’ll look at best practices when writing functions to return True or False. A Boolean-valued function, also known as a predicate function, is a function that returns a value of either True or False. It’s good programming to name this function beginning with the word is. It’s like you’re asking a question, “Is something True?” and the function then returns True, “Yes it is,” or False, “No, it isn’t.” Python has a set of rules to determine the truth value of any Python object.

00:33 Objects considered False, which we call falsy, are constants like None and False, numeric types with a value of 0, collection types that are empty, and objects with a .__bool__() method, which evaluates to False, or a .__len__() method, which evaluates to 0.

00:58 Any other Python object is considered truthy.

01:04 Here’s an example to determine if one number is divisible by another. It will return True to tell us it is and False to tell us it isn’t.

01:15 This function has two parameters, a and b, and we want to know if the argument provided for a is divisible by the argument provided for b. If a is divisible by b, then a divided by b will have a remainder of 0, and that’s what the modulus operator (%) gives us.

01:33 So, we’ll check if the operation a % b is 0. If it is, we return True. If it’s not, we return False.

01:42 Now, we could have written the condition with a comparison to 0, like I have in this commented version, but let’s be more Pythonic about it.

01:51 If a % b is 0, then it’s considered a falsy value. Putting a not in front of the falsy value makes the expression evaluate to True, so the condition not a % b will be True when a % b is 0. If that’s the case, we want to return True.

02:17 Since there’s no other condition to check for, we can have a return False outside the if block for the case when our condition is False. Again, if a % b isn’t 0, then it has a truthy value and taking the not of that truthy value evaluates to False.

02:39 The if condition will fail. We skip over the if block and execute what follows it, which is the return False statement. Let’s see this work.

02:59 We’ll see if 4 is divisible by 2, and it is. We’ll ask if 7 is divisible by 4, and it’s not.

03:13 Predicate functions often use the following: comparison operators, the membership operator, the identity operator, and the Boolean operator not.

03:26 In these cases, you can usually write the Boolean expression in the return statement. Here, we’re just returning the value of not a % b.

03:37 It will return True or False for us based on how not a % b is evaluated.

03:46 Let’s modify our version to look like that. We delete those two return statements. We are now going to return the value of this expression directly.

04:00 And since this is no longer an if statement, we’ll be sure to remove the colon that was there before. Let’s save this and try this out.

04:11 We’ll restart our interpreter,

04:18 import our new version, check that 4 still is divisible by 2,

04:27 and that 7 still is not divisible by 4. These evaluations work as before. A word of caution: you might not be able to return the expression directly if your condition involves or or and, and we’ll discuss that in the next lesson.