Hello everyone! I haven't been able to spend time programming for some months now, so I decided to brush up my very few skills by writing simple programs. I opted for "Guess the number" since it's pretty basic stuff (or so i thought). My main trouble was that I wanted to let the player quit by typing "quit", instead of asking for a number, for example "0".

If any other newbie has tried out this program, the problem is when the user tries to input anything other than a number. Python (not without reason) doesn't type-cast it into anything with int(), so the program crashes. The following is my solution to this problem, but it doesn't look very elegant at all.

I would appreciate any suggestions on making the code better. Thanks!

 
 
from random import *
 
print("\n* * * Welcome! * * *\n\nGo ahead and try to guess a number from 1 to 10. If you feel like quitting, type QUIT\n")
 
seed()
playing = True
validating = True
number = randint(1,10)
 
while playing:
 
    while validating:
        guess = input("Your guess? ")
        try:
            int(guess)
            break
        except:
            if str.upper(guess) == "QUIT":
                print ("Goodbye!")
                validating = False
                playing = False
            else:
                print("\nI don't think that was a number\n")
 
    if playing == False:
        break
    
    if int(guess) == 0:
        print ("Goodbye!")
        playing = False
    elif int(guess) < number:
        print("\nA little higher...\n")
    elif int(guess) > number:
        print("\nA little lower...\n")
    else:
        print("\nYou got it!\n")
        playing = False
 
 

Thanks a lot for your replies. I didn't know there were isalpha() and isdigit(). I tried looking up the subject searching "validate type in python", maybe it was a bad choice of words.

One thing I would recommend avoiding is repeating the same computation over and over, which is what you are doing when you use int(guesss) repeatedly. Calculate it once and store the result somewhere.

I'll try to remember this. Good advice.

All in all, I guess I wasn't too far off anyway, which is good news. Thanks again!