3.11 Lab: Smallest number

Write a program whose inputs are three integers, and whose output is the smallest of the three values.

If the input is:

7
15
3

The output is: 3

This is the code I have come up with:

num1 = input()
num2 = input()
num3 = input()

if (num1 < num2):
    if (num1 < num3):
        smallest_num = num1
elif (num2 < num1):
    if (num2 < num3):
        smallest_num = num2
else:
    smallest_num = num3
print(smallest_num)

This code works for that input, however if you input “29, 6, 17” it returned no output with an error

NameError: name 'smallest_num' is not defined".

I have dinked around quite a bit and tried adding smallest_num = min(num1, num2, num3) however nothing has yielded a passing output.

Answer

The issue is that input() returns a string. So when you compare your variables, you’re doing string comparisons instead of numerical comparisons. So, you need to convert your input to integers.

num1 = int(input("Enter num1: "))
num2 = int(input("Enter num2: "))
num3 = int(input("Enter num3: "))

print(min(num1, num2, num3))