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

If you plan to use the signed distance calculation snippet posted by phi (like I did) and your b might have value 0, you probably want to fix the code as described below:

import math

def distance(a, b):
    if (a == b):
        return 0
    elif (a < 0) and (b < 0) or (a > 0) and (b >= 0): # fix: b >= 0 to cover case b == 0
        if (a < b):
            return (abs(abs(a) - abs(b)))
        else:
            return -(abs(abs(a) - abs(b)))
    else:
        return math.copysign((abs(a) + abs(b)),b)

The original snippet does not work correctly regarding sign when a > 0 and b == 0.