How do you get the logical xor of two variables in Python?

Posted By: Zach Hirsch

How do you get the logical xor of two variables in Python?

For example, I have two variables that I expect to be strings. I want to test that only one of them contains a True value (is not None or the empty string):

str1 = raw_input("Enter string one:")
str2 = raw_input("Enter string two:")
if logical_xor(str1, str2):
    print "ok"
else:
    print "bad"

The ^ operator seems to be bitwise, and not defined on all objects:

>>> 1 ^ 1
0
>>> 2 ^ 1
3
>>> "abc" ^ ""
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'str' and 'str'

Solution

If you’re already normalizing the inputs to booleans, then != is xor.

bool(a) != bool(b)

Answered By: Coady

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