while loop

[ichabod801]

You obviously know if statements, you just need to know what to check. Let's assume the secret number is always no negative. This is easy. There is a string method called isdigit that returns True if all the characters in the string are digits. So you could do:

guess = input("Guess: ")
if guess.isdigit():
    guess_count += 1
    if int(guess) == secret_number:  # moved the int conversion to here.
        print("You win!")
        break
else:
    print('Please enter a positive integer.')

One thing a try/except block will do that this won't is allow for white space. That is, ' 1' will work with the try/except solution, but not here. But there is a strip method of strings that removes all white space at the beginning or end of a string. You can add that right to the input call, which returns a string:

guess = input("Guess: ").strip()
if guess.isdigit():
    guess_count += 1
    if int(guess) == secret_number:  # moved the int conversion to here.
        print("You win!")
        break
else:
    print('Please enter a positive integer.')

To handle negative integers, you could just check for a leading '-' character:

guess = input("Guess: ").strip()
if guess.isdigit() or (guess[0] == '-' and guess[1:].strip().isdigit()):
    guess_count += 1
    if int(guess) == secret_number:  # moved the int conversion to here.
        print("You win!")
        break
else:
    print('Please enter an integer.')

As you can see, this code is more complicated than try/except. But depending on the situation, the try/except method can get more complicated.