Switch statements in Python
7th May 2004
Python doesn’t support a native switch statement. I’ve found myself using the following coding idiom instead recently which seems to work pretty well:
{'option1': function1,
'option2': function2,
'option3': function3,
'option4': function4}[value]()
This works with lambdas as well, for inline calculations. Here’s a switch statement that assigns to a variable in PHP:
switch ($value) {
case 'a':
$result = $x * 5;
break;
case 'b':
$result = $x + 7;
break;
case 'c':
$result = $x - 2;
break;
}
And here’s the equivalent code in Python:
result = {
'a': lambda x: x * 5,
'b': lambda x: x + 7,
'c': lambda x: x - 2
}[value](x)
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