return Statement

As was already mentioned, the return statement can be used to return values from a function call. There are more properties of the return statement that are worth covering.

return None

Some functions return nothing (for example the print() function). To achieve this you can either return None, leave the return value blank after return, or put no return statement at all.

def none1():
    return

def none2():
    return None

def none3():
    x = 2 #Needs code to work

type(none1())

NoneType

type(none2())

NoneType

type(none3())

NoneType

return Breaks Out of the Function

It was stated above that the return statement breaks out of the function. This means that anything that comes directly after a return inside the function body will not execute. Consider the following example to illustrate this:

def message():
    print('This code will execute')
    return
    print('This code will not execute')

message()

This code will execute

It can be useful to use this feature of return to break out of a loop, or even to ignore the else or elif parts of an if statement.

For example, consider the function that checks if its argument is even or odd:

def is_even(value):
    if value % 2 == 0:
        return True
    else:
        return False

is_even(3)

False

is_even(6)

True

The else part of the function is unnecessary:

def is_even(value):
    if value % 2 == 0:
        return True
    return False

is_even(3)

False

return Tuples

Although not a feature of the return statement itself, it’s worth noting that tuple packing can be used for the value returned. This can be particularly useful when you need to return multiple values.

For example consider a function that splits a floating point number into it’s whole and decimal parts, returning both:

def floor_rem(num):
    whole = int(num)
    frac = num - whole
    
    return whole, frac

floor_rem(2.13)

(2, 0.1299999999999999)

Note that tuple unpacking can also be used to collect the return values of the function into multiple variables:

num = 3.14

whole, frac = floor_rem(num)

print('Number:', num)
print('Whole part:', whole)
print('Decimal part:', frac)

Number: 3.14
Whole part: 3
Decimal part: 0.14000000000000012