If you are familiar with any number of other programming languages – take C for example – you may wonder what happened to “switch”. The answer is, its SO much easier in Python to implement the same function. To keep it very very simple for a demo, consider testing for an “A” or a “B” in an input of any letter.

In C:

enum letter2Test {A, B, C};
enum letter2Test mynum = B ;
switch (mynum)
{
    case A:
        printf(“The letter is A”);
        break;
    case B:
        printf(“The letter is B”);
        break;
    default:
        printf(“This is some other letter.”);
        break;
}

return 0;
}

In Python, we can use a dictionary or list to replace the function of enum with less code:

letter2Test = {“A”:”A”, “B”:”B”, “C”:”C”}
mytestval = “B”
retval = letter2Test.setdefault(mytestval, “Some other letter.”)
print(“The letter is ” + str(retval))

or maybe…

letter2Test = [“A”, “B”]
mytestval = “C”
if mytestval in letter2Test:
    print(letter2Test[letter2Test.index(mytestval)])
else:
    print(“This is some other letter.”)