Define a Function - brutishly

[chopnhack]

LOL - My homework was completed, however, I think it was by force rather than skill:

L4 Problem 10
(5/5 points)
Define a function isVowel(char) that returns True if char is a vowel ('a', 'e', 'i', 'o', or 'u'), and False otherwise. You can assume that char is a single letter of any case (ie, 'A' and 'a' are both valid).

Do not use the keyword in. Your function should take in a single string and return a boolean.

def isVowel(char):
  '''
  char: a single letter of any case

  returns: True if char is a vowel and False otherwise.
  '''
  if char == 'a' or char == 'e' or char == 'i' or char == 'o' or char == 'u' \
            or char == 'A' or char == 'E' or char == 'I' or char == 'O'\
            or char == 'U':
       isVowel = True   
  else:
       isVowel = False
  return isVowel

Is there a cleaner way of doing this?

 

[Supercap2F]

How about converting the letter to upper case (I assume that there's a way of doing that in python?) and then you only have to test for the upper case vowels.
Dan

 

[chopnhack]

How about converting the letter to upper case (I assume that there's a way of doing that in python?) and then you only have to test for the upper case vowels.
Dan

Thanks Dan, LOL - the very same idea was presented in the next lesson!
# string.upper()

If I created a string to use for comparison, I could have then simply converted the case and retested. I am not sure if the test would be for each element in the string though as I had in the above code. I needed to capture each occurrence of the vowel, regardless of case.

 

[Gryd3]

def isVowel(char):
  '''
  char: a single letter of any case

  returns: True if char is a vowel and False otherwise.
  '''
  isVowel = False
  for letter in "aeiou"
    if string.lower(char) == letter
      isVowel = True  
  return isVowel

Does this work?

 

[chopnhack]

def isVowel(char):
  '''
  char: a single letter of any case

  returns: True if char is a vowel and False otherwise.
  '''
  isVowel = False
  for letter in "aeiou"
    if string.lower(char) == letter
      isVowel = True 
  return isVowel

Does this work?

It did not, but the automatic grader works off the principal that it will supply the input for (char). I am not sure what the error was exactly, but it pointed to the "aeiou" - does that line need a : at the end?

I guess then you could convert the contents of variable letter to upper case and test again.

 

[Gryd3]

def isVowel(char):
  '''
  char: a single letter of any case

  returns: True if char is a vowel and False otherwise.
  '''
  isVowel = False
  for letter in "aeiou":
    if string.lower(char) == letter:
      isVowel = True 
  return isVowel

Does this work?

It did not, but the automatic grader works off the principal that it will supply the input for (char). I am not sure what the error was exactly, but it pointed to the "aeiou" - does that line need a : at the end?

I guess then you could convert the contents of variable letter to upper case and test again.

I missed the ':' on the For loop, and IF statement... I'm not used to those things...
(Fixed)