7.1.Fancier Output Formatting¶
So far we’ve encountered two ways of writing values: expression statements and
the print() function. (A third way is using the write() method
of file objects; the standard output file can be referenced as sys.stdout.
See the Library Reference for more information on this.)
Often you’ll want more control over the formatting of your output than simply
printing space-separated values. There are two ways to format your output; the
first way is to do all the string handling yourself; using string slicing and
concatenation operations you can create any layout you can imagine. The
string type has some methods that perform useful operations for padding
strings to a given column width; these will be discussed shortly. The second
way is to use formatted string literals, or the
str.format() method.
The string module contains a Template class which offers
yet another way to substitute values into strings.
One question remains, of course: how do you convert values to strings? Luckily,
Python has ways to convert any value to a string: pass it to the repr()
or str() functions.
The str() function is meant to return representations of values which are
fairly human-readable, while repr() is meant to generate representations
which can be read by the interpreter (or will force a SyntaxError if
there is no equivalent syntax). For objects which don’t have a particular
representation for human consumption, str() will return the same value as
repr(). Many values, such as numbers or structures like lists and
dictionaries, have the same representation using either function. Strings, in
particular, have two distinct representations.
Some examples:
>>>s = 'Hello, world.'
>>>str(s)
'Hello, world.'
>>>repr(s)
"'Hello, world.'"
>>>str(1/7)
'0.14285714285714285'
>>>x = 10 * 3.25
>>>y = 200 * 200
>>>s = 'The value of x is ' + repr(x) + ', and y is ' + repr(y) + '...'
>>>print(s)
The value of x is 32.5, and y is 40000...
>>># The repr() of a string adds string quotes and backslashes:
...hello = 'hello, world\n'
>>>hellos = repr(hello)
>>>print(hellos)
'hello, world\n'
>>># The argument to repr() may be any Python object:
...repr((x, y, ('spam', 'eggs')))
"(32.5, 40000, ('spam', 'eggs'))"
Here are two ways to write a table of squares and cubes:
>>>for x in range(1, 11):
... print(repr(x).rjust(2), repr(x*x).rjust(3), end=' ')
... # Note use of 'end' on previous line
... print(repr(x*x*x).rjust(4))
...
1 1 1
2 4 8
3 9 27
4 16 64
5 25 125
6 36 216
7 49 343
8 64 512
9 81 729
10 100 1000
>>>for x in range(1, 11):
... print('{0:2d}{1:3d}{2:4d}'.format(x, x*x, x*x*x))
...
1 1 1
2 4 8
3 9 27
4 16 64
5 25 125
6 36 216
7 49 343
8 64 512
9 81 729
10 100 1000
(Note that in the first example, one space between each column was added by the
way print() works: by default it adds spaces between its arguments.)
This example demonstrates the str.rjust() method of string
objects, which right-justifies a string in a field of a given width by padding
it with spaces on the left. There are similar methods str.ljust() and
str.center(). These methods do not write anything, they just return a
new string. If the input string is too long, they don’t truncate it, but
return it unchanged; this will mess up your column lay-out but that’s usually
better than the alternative, which would be lying about a value. (If you
really want truncation you can always add a slice operation, as in
x.ljust(n)[:n].)
There is another method, str.zfill(), which pads a numeric string on the
left with zeros. It understands about plus and minus signs:
>>>'12'.zfill(5)
'00012'
>>>'-3.14'.zfill(7)
'-003.14'
>>>'3.14159265359'.zfill(5)
'3.14159265359'
Basic usage of the str.format() method looks like this:
>>>print('We are the{}who say "{}!"'.format('knights', 'Ni'))
We are the knights who say "Ni!"
The brackets and characters within them (called format fields) are replaced with
the objects passed into the str.format() method. A number in the
brackets can be used to refer to the position of the object passed into the
str.format() method.
>>>print('{0}and{1}'.format('spam', 'eggs'))
spam and eggs
>>>print('{1}and{0}'.format('spam', 'eggs'))
eggs and spam
If keyword arguments are used in the str.format() method, their values
are referred to by using the name of the argument.
>>>print('This{food}is{adjective}.'.format(
... food='spam', adjective='absolutely horrible'))
This spam is absolutely horrible.
Positional and keyword arguments can be arbitrarily combined:
>>>print('The story of{0},{1}, and{other}.'.format('Bill', 'Manfred',
other='Georg'))
The story of Bill, Manfred, and Georg.
'!a' (apply ascii()), '!s' (apply str()) and '!r'
(apply repr()) can be used to convert the value before it is formatted:
>>>contents = 'eels'
>>>print('My hovercraft is full of{}.'.format(contents))
My hovercraft is full of eels.
>>>print('My hovercraft is full of{!r}.'.format(contents))
My hovercraft is full of 'eels'.
An optional ':' and format specifier can follow the field name. This allows
greater control over how the value is formatted. The following example
rounds Pi to three places after the decimal.
>>>import math
>>>print('The value of PI is approximately{0:.3f}.'.format(math.pi))
The value of PI is approximately 3.142.
Passing an integer after the ':' will cause that field to be a minimum
number of characters wide. This is useful for making tables pretty.
>>>table = {'Sjoerd': 4127, 'Jack': 4098, 'Dcab': 7678}
>>>for name, phone in table.items():
... print('{0:10}==>{1:10d}'.format(name, phone))
...
Jack ==> 4098
Dcab ==> 7678
Sjoerd ==> 4127
If you have a really long format string that you don’t want to split up, it
would be nice if you could reference the variables to be formatted by name
instead of by position. This can be done by simply passing the dict and using
square brackets '[]' to access the keys
>>>table = {'Sjoerd': 4127, 'Jack': 4098, 'Dcab': 8637678}
>>>print('Jack:{0[Jack]:d}; Sjoerd:{0[Sjoerd]:d}; '
... 'Dcab:{0[Dcab]:d}'.format(table))
Jack: 4098; Sjoerd: 4127; Dcab: 8637678
This could also be done by passing the table as keyword arguments with the ‘**’
notation.
>>>table = {'Sjoerd': 4127, 'Jack': 4098, 'Dcab': 8637678}
>>>print('Jack:{Jack:d}; Sjoerd:{Sjoerd:d}; Dcab:{Dcab:d}'.format(**table))
Jack: 4098; Sjoerd: 4127; Dcab: 8637678
This is particularly useful in combination with the built-in function
vars(), which returns a dictionary containing all local variables.
For a complete overview of string formatting with str.format(), see
Format String Syntax.
7.1.1.Old string formatting¶
The % operator can also be used for string formatting. It interprets the
left argument much like a sprintf()-style format string to be applied
to the right argument, and returns the string resulting from this formatting
operation. For example:
>>>import math
>>>print('The value of PI is approximately%5.3f.' % math.pi)
The value of PI is approximately 3.142.
More information can be found in the printf-style String Formatting section.