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Aswin Barath
Aswin Barath

Posted on • Originally published at dev.to

the return statements in functions

Let me start with a fact: Every function returns a value when called.

Well, I don't know about you, but I was surprised to know about it in the first place!

Let's see an example to prove my point:
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Output:

Welcome to my blog post
None
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Did you see that?
When I called the function, it has returned the special type None.
The variable post stores it and prints it out in the second line.

Now, we can explicitly return a value from a function by using the return keyword.

return statement

  • The return statement includes a return keyword followed by an expression.
  • An expression is a set of conditions which produces a value.
  • So, the return statement can contain an expression or an explicit value to be returned.
  • A return statement also ends the function execution. This means that any statements inside a function following the return statement will not be executed.
  • Take a note that return statement cannot be used outside a function.

Let's code a few examples:

1) Single return statement

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Output:

21
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As you can see in this example, we have given an expression which returns the product of given two numbers.

2) Multiple return statements

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Output:

21
3.14
Try again!
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Here, an explicit value is specified in multiple return statements.

3) return statement with multiple values

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Output:

(21, 63, 210)
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This example returns dynamic values in a tuple based on the given argument.

Code along and have fun.

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