Alternative for if and conditional statement in python

Question

So my problem is that I need to make a receipt to calculate the total cost and I have been given 2 option each option has different price like for example.

first = 5$

second= 10$

third = 5$

fourth = 10$

total is either first or third , first or fourth , second or third and second or fourth.So the problem is that I cant use if or any other conditional statement and I need to find the total cost of either of these. first or third , first or fourth , second or third and second or fourth

Answer 1

The power of python is it has so many included libraries to do things you need -- no need to re-invent the wheel. In this case there's a great library for creating all sorts of combinations of values -- itertools!

So you want the sum of any combination of 2 values.

If we treat first,second, third, fourth as a list, called "val", We can use itertools to create all 2 value permutations,

We can use map to calculate the sum of all permutations.

import itertools

val = [5, 10, 5, 10]

totals = map(sum, itertools.combinations(val, 2))

for total in totals:

print(total)

Itertools also has a "product", which requires 2 separate lists, so you could group things as you want and do something like:

import itertools

vals = [(5,10), (5, 10)]

totals = map(sum, itertools.product(*vals))

for total in totals:

print(total)

That will give you the sums of 1,3; 2, 3; 1, 4; 1, 3. Like you asked. The for loop is only there to print the values it produces at the end.

Let me know if this leaves any further questions.