even_odd challenge help please ("while" indentation)

Question

I have a question regarding the indentation process in Python. I used workspaces to check my work for the even_odd challenge and found that indenting the "while" loop (including the "while start:") was giving me an indent error. I unindented it and it worked fine (see last code below). Here comes my problem:

In the letter_game refinement video Kenneth has two of the "while" loops indented after the "def get_guess():" and "def play():" functions:

    def get_guess(bad_guesses, good_guesses):
        while True:
            # takes guess
            guess = input("Guess a letter: ").lower()

            if len(guess) != 1:
                print("You can only guess a single letter!")


    def play(done):
        clear()
        secret_word = random.choice(words)
        bad_guesses = []
        good_guesses = []

        while True:
            draw(bad_guesses, good_guesses, secret_word)
            guess = get_guess(bad_guesses, good_guesses)

Why does the code work here with the indentation and not in the even_odd challenge? Does it have to do with scopes? I would really appreciate it if someone could explain this to me so I don't keep guessing when to indent my code. (As you can see below the challenge doesn't let me pass unless I unindent the "while" loop.) Thank you.

even.py

import random

start = 5

def even_odd(num):
    # If % 2 is 0, the number is even.
    # Since 0 is falsey, we have to invert it with not.
    return not num % 2

  while start:
    num = random.randint(1,99)
    if even_odd(num):
      print("{} is even".format(num))
    else:
      print("{} is odd".format(num))

    start -= 1

Answer 1 · 2016-02-19T06:16:36Z

February 19, 2016 6:16am

There are three basic parts to indentation.

Ending a line with a colon (:). This signifies that a code block will start with the next statement
The codeblock below the statement with a colon, must be indented a uniform amount. Can be anything but convention is 4 spaces.
Any statement that has a different indentation from the current codebock must be a newly indented codeblock, or line up with a less-indented line from an earlier codeblock (this closed the current codeblock)

See comments in code:

import random

start = 5

def even_odd(num):  # <-- Colon - start new codeblock
    # If % 2 is 0, the number is even.   # <-- first line of codeblock established indentation
    # Since 0 is falsey, we have to invert it with not.
    return not num % 2

  while start:  # <-- Error: This change in indentation does not match current or previous codeblock
    num = random.randint(1,99)
    if even_odd(num):
      print("{} is even".format(num))
    else:
      print("{} is odd".format(num))

    start -= 1

If you remove the SPACES before the while so it aligns with the def above. all should work

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Ali Khan

Ali Khan

even_odd challenge help please ("while" indentation)

1 Answer

Chris Freeman

Chris Freeman

Ali Khan

Ali Khan

Chris Freeman

Chris Freeman

Ali Khan

Ali Khan