There is no way to do this, and that’s intentional. The ternary if is only supposed to be used for trivial cases.
If you want to use the result of a computation twice, put it in a temporary variable:
value = info.findNext("b")
value = value if value else "Oompa Loompa"
Once you do this, it becomes clear that you’re doing something silly, and in fact the pythonic way to write this is:
value = info.findNext("b")
if not value:
value = "Oompa Loompa"
And that’s actually 5 fewer keystrokes than your original attempt.
If you really want to save keystrokes, you can instead do this:
value = info.findNext("b") or "Oompa Loompa"
But that’s discouraged by many style guides, and by the BDFL.
If you’re only doing this once, it’s better to be more explicit. If you’re doing it half a dozen times, it’s trivial—and much better—to make findNext take an optional default to return instead of None, just like all those built-in and stdlib functions:
def findNext(self, needle, defvalue=None):
# same code as before, but instead of return None or falling off the end,
# just return defvalue.
Then you can do this:
value = info.findNext("b", "Oompa Loompa")