Validating where the "@" symbol is in an email. Not validation of the email itself

Question

"it must contain an “@” symbol which is NEITHER the first character nor the last character in the string."

So I have this assignment in my class and I can't for the life of me figure out how to make the boolean false for having it at the front or end of the email. This is what I have so far.

def validEmail1(myString):
    for i in myString:
        if i == "@":
            return True
    else:
        return False

Answer 1

With s as your string, you can do:

not (s.endswith('@') or s.startswith('@')) and s.count('@')==1

Test:

def valid(s):
    return not (s.endswith('@') or s.startswith('@')) and s.count('@')==1

cases=('@abc','abc@','abc@def', 'abc@@def')

for case in cases:
    print(case, valid(case))

Prints:

@abc False
abc@ False
abc@def True
abc@@def False

---

You can also use a slice, but you also need to make sure (indirectly) that the string does not start or end with '@' by making sure the count is 1:

def valid(s):
    return '@' in s[1:-1] and s.count('@')==1