Given a year, report if it is a leap year.
The tricky thing here is that a leap year in the Gregorian calendar occurs:
on every year that is evenly divisible by 4
except every year that is evenly divisible by 100
unless the year is also evenly divisible by 400
For example, 1997 is not a leap year, but 1996 is. 1900 is not a leap year, but 2000 is.
If your language provides a method in the standard library that does this look-up, pretend it doesn't exist and implement it yourself.
Though our exercise adopts some very simple rules, there is more to learn!
For a delightful, four minute explanation of the whole leap year phenomenon, go watch this youtube video.
Sometimes it is necessary to raise an exception. When you do this, you should include a meaningful error message to indicate what the source of the error is. This makes your code more readable and helps significantly with debugging. Not every exercise will require you to raise an exception, but for those that do, the tests will only pass if you include a message.
To raise a message with an exception, just write it as an argument to the exception type. For example, instead of
raise Exception, you should write:
raise Exception("Meaningful message indicating the source of the error")To run the tests, run the appropriate command below (why they are different):
- Python 2.7:
py.test leap_test.py - Python 3.4+:
pytest leap_test.py
Alternatively, you can tell Python to run the pytest module (allowing the same command to be used regardless of Python version):
python -m pytest leap_test.py
-v: enable verbose output-x: stop running tests on first failure--ff: run failures from previous test before running other test cases
For other options, see python -m pytest -h
Note that, when trying to submit an exercise, make sure the solution is in the $EXERCISM_WORKSPACE/python/leap directory.
You can find your Exercism workspace by running exercism debug and looking for the line that starts with Workspace.
For more detailed information about running tests, code style and linting, please see Running the Tests.
JavaRanch Cattle Drive, exercise 3 http://www.javaranch.com/leap.jsp
It's possible to submit an incomplete solution so you can see how others have completed the exercise.