is
compares identity. A string will never be identical to a not-string.
==
is equality. But a string will never be equal to either True
or False
.
You want neither.
path = '/bla/bla/bla'
if path:
print "True"
else:
print "False"
While the other posters addressed why is True
does what it does, I wanted to respond to this part of your post:
I thought Python treats anything with value as True. Why is this happening?
Coming from Java, I got tripped up by this, too. Python does not treat anything with a value as True
. Witness:
if 0:
print("Won't get here")
This will print nothing because 0 is treated as False
. In fact, zero of any numeric type evaluates to False
. They also made decimal
work the way you'd expect:
from decimal import *
from fractions import *
if 0 or 0.0 or 0j or Decimal(0) or Fraction(0, 1):
print("Won't get here")
Here are the other value which evaluate to False
:
if None or False or '' or () or [] or {} or set() or range(0):
print("Won't get here")
Sources:
Source: Stackoverflow.com