Is there a better way to write nested if statements in python?

Question

(Closed). This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers. question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/58927718/is-there-a-better-way-to-write-nested-if-statements-in-python

Answer 1

While @Aryerez and @SencerH.'s answers work, each possible value of numeral_sys_1 has to be repeatedly written for each possible value of numeral_sys_2 when listing the value pairs, making the data structure harder to maintain when the number of possible values increases. You can instead use a nested dict in place of your nested if statements instead:

mapping = {
    'Hexadecimal': {'Decimal': 1, 'Binary': 2},
    'Binary': {'Decimal': 3, 'Hexadecimal': 5},
    'Decimal': {'Hexadecimal': 4, 'Binary': 6}
}
def convert_what(numeral_sys_1, numeral_sys_2):
    return mapping.get(numeral_sys_1, {}).get(numeral_sys_2, 0)

Alternatively, you can generate the pairs of values for the mapping with the itertools.permutations method, the order of which follows that of the input sequence:

mapping = dict(zip(permutations(('Hexadecimal', 'Decimal', 'Binary'), r=2), (1, 2, 4, 6, 3, 5)))
def convert_what(numeral_sys_1, numeral_sys_2):
    return mapping.get((numeral_sys_1, numeral_sys_2), 0)