Trouble with Code Challenge: Raise exceptions

Question

So I am in the middle of a challenge and I can not figure out what I am doing wrong. I figured I needed an input for the program to read how many characters there are in the string to determine if an error needs to be raised, but my code is flawed somewhere, I know this has to be easy, and I am over thinking it. Please help.
Here is the challenge:
Can you please raise a ValueError if the product_idea is less than 3 characters long? 
This is my code:
productidea is a string.
def suggest(productidea):
    productidea = input("What is a name for product? ")
    if productidea < str (3):
        raise ValueError ("Characters need to be 3 or more!")
else:
    return product_idea + "inator"
This is errors I am getting:
Ran 1 test in 0.000s
OK
EE
ERROR: testexceptionnotraised (main_.TestRaiseExecution)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 24, in testexceptionnot_raised
  File "", line 2, in suggest
EOFError: EOF when reading a line
======================================================================
ERROR: testexceptionraised (main.TestRaiseExecution)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 32, in testexceptionraised
  File "", line 2, in suggest
EOFError: EOF when reading a line

mouseandweb · Accepted Answer

Hello @Jacob McKinney (https://teamtreehouse.com/jacobmckinney2) ,
We cannot compare string and integer, so I assume that is why you typed this:
python3
product_idea < str (3):

But this would compare the 12 characters in the string, product-idea, with the one character in the string, 3. What you want to do is compare the amount of characters in string, productidea, to the integer 3. Like this:
```python3
productidea < 3:

This won't work either! Because we are still missing the last part, which is that we are still comparing the string, product_idea, with the integer, 3. We cannot compare a string with an integer. We need to use the len() function!
python3
len(productidea) < 3:
```
The len() function returns an integer representing the length of the string passed to it. The input comes in as a string so productidea is a string. Now we are comparing the length (an integer) of the string, product_idea, with the integer, 3.
You can continue that:
python3
def suggest(product_idea):
    product_idea = input("What is a name for product? ")
    if len(product_idea) < 3:
        raise ValueError("Characters need to be 3 or more!")

I hope this helps. Reach out if you have any other questions or need a follow-up.

athena · Answer

it looks like you are checking that product_idea is less than the string "3", rather than checking if product_idea has fewer than 3 characters

Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Looking to learn something new?

Jacob McKinney

Jacob McKinney

Trouble with Code Challenge: Raise exceptions

This is errors I am getting:

EE

ERROR: test_exception_not_raised (main.TestRaiseExecution)

ERROR: test_exception_raised (main.TestRaiseExecution)

2 Answers

mouseandweb

mouseandweb

athena

athena