How do I use a Boolean in Python?

python boolean
Federer picture Federer · Nov 17, 2009 · Viewed 626.5k times · Source

Does Python actually contain a Boolean value? I know that you can do:

checker = 1
if checker:
    #dostuff

But I'm quite pedantic and enjoy seeing booleans in Java. For instance:

Boolean checker;
if (someDecision)
{
    checker = true;
}
if(checker)
{
    //some stuff
}

Is there such a thing as a Boolean in Python? I can't seem to find anything like it in the documentation.

Answer

Bastien Léonard picture Bastien Léonard · Nov 17, 2009 
checker = None 

if some_decision:
    checker = True

if checker:
    # some stuff

[Edit]

For more information: http://docs.python.org/library/functions.html#bool

Your code works too, since 1 is converted to True when necessary. Actually Python didn't have a boolean type for a long time (as in old C), and some programmers still use integers instead of booleans.

Related questions

Truth value of a Series is ambiguous. Use a.empty, a.bool(), a.item(), a.any() or a.all()

Having issue filtering my result dataframe with an or condition. I want my result df to extract all column var values that are above 0.25 and below -0.25. This logic below gives me an ambiguous truth value however it work when …

Read More
Converting from a string to boolean in Python?

Does anyone know how to do convert from a string to a boolean in Python? I found this link. But it doesn't look like a proper way to do it. I.e. using built-in functionality, etc. The reason I'm asking …

Read More
Parsing boolean values with argparse

I would like to use argparse to parse boolean command-line arguments written as "--foo True" or "--foo False". For example: my_program --my_boolean_flag False However, the following test code does not do what I would like: import argparse …

Read More