The following example uses a uniquely named exception to indicate that the user wishes to quit rather than supply input. We'll define our own exception, and define function which rewrites a built-in exception to be our own exception.

We'll define a function, ckyorn, which does a “Check for Y or N”. This function has two parameters, prompt and help, that are used to prompt the user and print help if the user requests it. In this case, the return value is always a "Y" or "N". A request for help ("?") is handled automatically. A request to quit is treated as an exception, and leaves the normal execution flow. This function will accept "Q" or end-of-file (usually Control- D , but also Control- Z on Windows) as the quit signal.

class UserQuit( Exception ): pass

def ckyorn( prompt, help="" ):
    ok= 0
    while not ok:
        try:
            a=raw_input( prompt + " [y,n,q,?]: " )
        except EOFError:
            raise UserQuit
        if a.upper() in [ 'Y', 'N', 'YES', 'NO' ]: ok= 1
        if a.upper() in [ 'Q', 'QUIT' ]:
            raise UserQuit
        if a.upper() in [ '?' ]:
            print help
    return a.upper()[0] 

We can use this function as shown in the following example.

import interaction
answer= interaction.ckyorn(
    help= "Enter Y if finished entering data",
    prompt= "All done?")

This function transforms an EOFError into a UserQuit exception, and also transforms a user entry of "Q" or "q" into this same exception. In a longer program, this exception permits a short-circuit of all further processing, omitting some potentially complex if statements.

Details of the ckyorn Function. Our function uses a loop that will terminate when we have successfully interpreted an answer from the user. We may get a request for help or perhaps some uninterpretable input from the user. We will continue our loop until we get something meaningful. The post condition will be that the variable ok is set to True and the answer, a is one of ("Y", "y", "N", "n").

Within the loop, we surround our raw_input function with a try suite,. This allows us to process any kind of input, including user inputs that raise exceptions. The most common example is the user entering the end-of-file character on their keyboard. For Linux it is control- D ; for Windows it is control- Z .

We handle EOFError by raising our UserQuit exception. This separates end-of-file on ordinary disk files elsewhere in the program from this end-of-file generated from the user's keyboard. When we get end-of-file from the user, we need to tidy up and exit the program promptly. When we get end-of-file from an ordinary disk file, this will require different processing.

If no exception was raised, we examine the input character to see if we can interpret it. Note that if the user enters 'Q' or 'QUIT', we treat this exactly like as an end-of-file; we raise the UserQuit exception so that the program can tidy up and exit quickly.

We return a single-character result only for ordinary, valid user inputs. A user request to quit is considered extraordinary, and we raise an exception for that.