How do I find the difference between two values without knowing which is larger?

Question

I was wondering if there was a function built into Python that can determine the distance between two rational numbers but without me telling it which number is larger. e.g.

Answer 1

abs function is definitely not what you need as it is not calculating the distance. Try abs (-25+15) to see that it's not working. A distance between the numbers is 40 but the output will be 10. Because it's doing the math and then removing "minus" in front. I am using this custom function:

def distance(a, b):
    if (a < 0) and (b < 0) or (a > 0) and (b > 0):
        return abs( abs(a) - abs(b) )
    if (a < 0) and (b > 0) or (a > 0) and (b < 0):
        return abs( abs(a) + abs(b) )


print distance(-25, -15)
print distance(25, -15)
print distance(-25, 15)
print distance(25, 15)