How can I check that a list has one and only one truthy value?

Question

In python, I have a list that should have one and only one truthy value (that is, bool(value) is True). Is there a clever way to check for this

Answer 1

import collections

def only_n(l, testval=True, n=1):
    counts = collections.Counter(l)
    return counts[testval] == n

Linear time. Uses the built-in Counter class, which is what you should be using to check counts.

Re-reading your question, it looks like you actually want to check that there is only one truthy value, rather than one True value. Try this:

import collections

def only_n(l, testval=True, coerce=bool, n=1):
    counts = collections.Counter((coerce(x) for x in l))
    return counts[testval] == n

While you can get better best case performance, nothing has better worst-case performance. This is also short and easy to read.

Here's a version optimised for best-case performance:

import collections
import itertools

def only_n(l, testval=True, coerce=bool, n=1):
    counts = collections.Counter()
    def iterate_and_count():
        for x in itertools.imap(coerce,l):
            yield x
            if x == testval and counts[testval] > n:
               break
    counts.update(iterate_and_count())
    return counts[testval] == n

The worst case performance has a high k (as in O(kn+c)), but it is completely general.

Here's an ideone to experiment with performance: http://ideone.com/ZRrv2m