The printf() function was most probably introduced in C. The function, as most of the programmers know, prints formatted string according to a given format. PHP, being derived from C, has the same function with some added features. But in Python, the function is totally excluded 🙁
Python developers believe that there should be two seperate procedures to print a formatted string – format a string and then print it. So python has a different mechanism of doing the task.
Lets see some language specific examples:
C:
|
1 2 |
# include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("%s is a string while %d is a number","maSnun",23); } |
PHP:
|
1 |
<?php printf("%s is a string while %d is a number","maSnun",23); ?> |
Python: (Python 3)
|
1 2 |
s = "%s is a string while %d is a number" % ("maSnun", 23) print(s) |
Here, we format a string using the % (Modulo sign) or string formatting operator or the interpolation operator. If there was a single argument required for the formatting, we would simply pass it after the second modulo. Example:
s = “%s is a string ” % “maSnun”
But if we need to pass more than one argument to the formatting operator, we will have to pass a tuple of the arguments (like I have done in the first example). A tuple is an ordered collection which cannot be modified once it has been created. In other words, it’s rather like a read only array.
More About Tuples
You set up a tuple with round brackets (not
the square brackets you use to set up a list),
but you then access the individual members of
either with square brackets. That means that
you can use common code to process an ordered
collection, whether it’s a list or a tupledemo = (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, “lots”)