How to get an if-statement to accept multiple spellings of a string?

November 19, 2021

I’m working on a little demo of a Command Terminal that stores some stuff (Zones, items held within those zones, etc). I was inspired by this game called GTFO. Anyways, I’m trying to get an If Statement to accept multiple spellings of a command. For instance, the command (Help) could be full uppercase, full lowercase, grammatically correct, etc. However, while it does run up until the input, when I attempt to input Help or any variation of help, it stops dead. Tried dissecting it into a separate variable (helpCommand), but didn’t work. Any suggestions?

import sys,time
def slowPrint(text,delayTime):
  for character in text:
    sys.stdout.write(character)
    sys.stdout.flush()
    time.sleep(delayTime)

#Welcome screen.
slowPrint("||Facility Main Command Terminal||\n\nEnter Help for command prompts for The Main Facitliy Command Terminal.",.05)
command = input("\n\n||Please Input Command Below||\n")

#Help Command: Gives system commands.
helpCommand = ["Help", "help", "HELP"]

if command == helpCommand:
 slowPrint("\n||Commands||\n\nZoneList: Zone List lists any and all zones inside the Facility Database.\n\nZoneStock: Zone Stock shows all stocked items within specific zone.\n\nItem: After inputting command, requires the name of item. Lists where a specific item is within a specific zone and what it does.\n\nPersonal: Lists all personal in Facility Database, their work status (Working with company or not, and reason for firing) and their ID number.\n\nPersonalID: Will require an ID after command. Once ID is inputted, it will give all basic info the Personal command gives and some extra tidbits.", .05)

>Solution :

If all you are looking for is case-insensitivity, you can force the case of the input to a particular setting and do the comparison that way:

if command.casefold() == 'help':
    slowPrint("\n||Commands ...")

If you truly have different key words you want to match, use a set or frozenset to provide high-performance in operations:

HELP_COMMANDS = frozenset(word.casefold() for word in ['help', 'sos', 'mayday'])

# ...

if command.casefold() in HELP_COMMANDS:
    slowPrint("\n||Commands ...")