is is identity testing, and == is equality testing. What happens in your code would be emulated in the interpreter like this:
>>> a = 'pub'
>>> b = ''.join(['p', 'u', 'b'])
>>> a == b
True
>>> a is b
False
So, no wonder they're not the same, right?
In other words: a is b is the equivalent of id(a) == id(b)
Does the == operator compare strings by value or address?
python - Why does comparing strings using either '==' or 'is' sometimes produce a different result? - Stack Overflow
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I thought that Python was different from other OOP languages like Java and C++ in that it implements equality of strings by comparing their value. But I've been reading that Python actually compares strings by their address, so the == shouldn't be used for value comparison. But from my own testing, == seems to work just fine for value comparison...
So does == compare value or address (or some other property of objects, like ID or something) of two objects?
is is identity testing, and == is equality testing. What happens in your code would be emulated in the interpreter like this:
>>> a = 'pub'
>>> b = ''.join(['p', 'u', 'b'])
>>> a == b
True
>>> a is b
False
So, no wonder they're not the same, right?
In other words: a is b is the equivalent of id(a) == id(b)
Other answers here are correct: is is used for identity comparison, while == is used for equality comparison. Since what you care about is equality (the two strings should contain the same characters), in this case the is operator is simply wrong and you should be using == instead.
The reason is works interactively is that (most) string literals are interned by default. From Wikipedia:
Interned strings speed up string comparisons, which are sometimes a performance bottleneck in applications (such as compilers and dynamic programming language runtimes) that rely heavily on hash tables with string keys. Without interning, checking that two different strings are equal involves examining every character of both strings. This is slow for several reasons: it is inherently O(n) in the length of the strings; it typically requires reads from several regions of memory, which take time; and the reads fills up the processor cache, meaning there is less cache available for other needs. With interned strings, a simple object identity test suffices after the original intern operation; this is typically implemented as a pointer equality test, normally just a single machine instruction with no memory reference at all.
So, when you have two string literals (words that are literally typed into your program source code, surrounded by quotation marks) in your program that have the same value, the Python compiler will automatically intern the strings, making them both stored at the same memory location. (Note that this doesn't always happen, and the rules for when this happens are quite convoluted, so please don't rely on this behavior in production code!)
Since in your interactive session both strings are actually stored in the same memory location, they have the same identity, so the is operator works as expected. But if you construct a string by some other method (even if that string contains exactly the same characters), then the string may be equal, but it is not the same string -- that is, it has a different identity, because it is stored in a different place in memory.
Your condition:
if location.lower() != 'united states of america' or location.lower() != 'usa':
will never be False, since location.lower() can't be 2 different strings at the same time.
I suspect you want:
if location.lower() != 'united states of america' and location.lower() != 'usa':
You are looking for an AND condition instead of a OR condition in your if statement. If you change that you should be set
Use !=. See comparison operators. For comparing object identities, you can use the keyword is and its negation is not.
e.g.
1 == 1 # -> True
1 != 1 # -> False
[] is [] #-> False (distinct objects)
a = b = []; a is b # -> True (same object)
Not equal != (vs equal ==)
Are you asking about something like this?
answer = 'hi'
if answer == 'hi': # equal
print "hi"
elif answer != 'hi': # not equal
print "no hi"
This Python - Basic Operators chart might be helpful.