Is it possible only to declare a variable without assigning any value in Python?

Question

Is it possible to declare a variable in Python, like so?:

var

so that it initialized to None? It seems like Python allows this, but as soon

Answer 1

First of all, my response to the question you've originally asked

Q: How do I discover if a variable is defined at a point in my code?

A: Read up in the source file until you see a line where that variable is defined.

But further, you've given a code example that there are various permutations of that are quite pythonic. You're after a way to scan a sequence for elements that match a condition, so here are some solutions:

def findFirstMatch(sequence):
    for value in sequence:
        if matchCondition(value):
            return value

    raise LookupError("Could not find match in sequence")

Clearly in this example you could replace the raise with a return None depending on what you wanted to achieve.

If you wanted everything that matched the condition you could do this:

def findAllMatches(sequence):
    matches = []
    for value in sequence:
        if matchCondition(value):
            matches.append(value)

    return matches

There is another way of doing this with yield that I won't bother showing you, because it's quite complicated in the way that it works.

Further, there is a one line way of achieving this:

all_matches = [value for value in sequence if matchCondition(value)]