Hello there, I am currently a novice at python and am studying for the pcep entry level certification but, I am having difficulty understanding the output of the following code:
i included a picture showing the code in question. The answer is explained but it doesn’t click for me. Why does the variable get incremented twice inside the else: branch?
i understand it getting incremented once inside the else branch but I do not understand why it is incremented another time after.
I hope this makes sense and I appreciate anyone who responds back. Thank you
Please don’t post pictures of code. We don’t edit code with Photoshop, and pictures discriminate against the blind and visually impaired who are using a screen reader.
Yes, blind programmers exist.
Please post the code as text, copy and paste it (don’t retype it from memory) and place it between “code fences” so the indentation is not lost. In the website post entry widget, you can use the </> button or you can type three backticks on a line of their own like this:
```
code goes here
```
That way we can copy and paste the code, if we need to run it.
The else on the for loop here is actually a complete red herring. It’s going to be executed any time the inner loop doesn’t break, which - since there is no break statement in it at all - is inevitable. So the loop is equivalent to this:
others = -1
for i in [1, 2]:
for j in [1]:
if i == j:
others += 1 # first increment
others += 1 # second increment
print(others)
Since that second increment happens once for each pass through the outer loop, it will happen twice, which should be obvious if we remove most of the code:
for i in [1, 2]:
others += 1
I think the description may be misleading you a little; when it says that the variable is “incremented twice”, what it means is that Python will hit that line of code twice - once when i is 1, and once when i is 2. Each time, others will get incremented (by one).
