Why will the While Loop not end when I ender the correct input?

January 7, 2022

I have had an issue where I can’t get the While loop to terminate.

    userinput = ("")

while userinput != ("Search" or "Add"):
  userinput = input("Search or Add?")

  if userinput == "Search":
    Search()
  elif userinput == "Add":
    print("run add request")
  else: print("please choose from the following two options.")

Edit: I am sorry the changes have worked. I think after I implemented the changes I had an issue with the Shell running the previous version. Sometimes I have no idea what is happening. Thank you all again.

Edit Edit: Placed the original code back in as I did not take into account that it would confuse anyone looking for their own solution. I am quite new in terms of usage of the site. Thanks again for the help

>Solution :

The issue is with your while test. A couple of things:

You can’t use or like this. or needs two full conditions that resolve to true or false. Here you have one condition userinput != "Search" and a string "Add". So it’s always going to return True since a non-zero value is always True.

As an example:
```
if "Add": print("true")

>>true
```
Instead:
```
userinput != "Search" or userinput != "Add"
```
or is not correct when testing two negations like !=. One of the two conditions will always return true. For instance if you input "Add" then the condition userinput != "Search" will be True and your while loop will continue since True or False = True. So on and so forth. Instead you want an and.
```
 while userinput != "Search" and userinput != "Add":
```

As I suggested in my comment though, it’s probably just easier to use the not in operator on a list:

while userinput not in ['Search','Add']:

This way as your list grows your test stays nice and small/condense.

Also, while this is just my opinion, I applaud your original pre-edit code where you supplied the condition for breaking your while loop in the while statement instead of doing while True:. Having had many years of bug hunting and feature adding and hotfixing, I know every time I see while True: I’m going to be hunting through hundreds of lines of codes looking for every break. while True: and break has its time and place (I imagine), but I feel like it should be an exception use-case, not the rule.