html input output,7. Input and Output

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.