An Informal Introduction to Python¶

Numbers¶

The interpreter acts as a simple calculator: you can type an expression at it and it will write the value. Expression syntax is straightforward: the operators +, -, * and / work just like in most other languages (for example, Pascal or C); parentheses can be used for grouping. For example:

>>> 2+2
4
>>> # This is a comment
... 2+2
4
>>> 2+2  # and a comment on the same line as code
4
>>> (50-5*6)/4
5.0
>>> 8/5 # Fractions aren't lost when dividing integers
1.6000000000000001

Note: You might not see exactly the same result; floating point results can differ from one machine to another. We will say more later about controlling the appearance of floating point output; what we see here is the most informative display but not as easy to read as we would get with:

>>> print(8/5)
1.6

For clarity in this tutorial we will show the simpler floating point output unless we are specifically discussing output formatting, and explain later why these two ways of displaying floating point data come to be different. See Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations for a full discussion.

To do integer division and get an integer result, discarding any fractional result, there is another operator, //:

>>> # Integer division returns the floor:
... 7//3
2
>>> 7//-3
-3

The equal sign ('=') is used to assign a value to a variable. Afterwards, no result is displayed before the next interactive prompt:

>>> width = 20
>>> height = 5*9
>>> width * height
900

A value can be assigned to several variables simultaneously:

>>> x = y = z = 0  # Zero x, y and z
>>> x
0
>>> y
0
>>> z
0

Variables must be “defined” (assigned a value) before they can be used, or an error will occur:

>>> # try to access an undefined variable
... n
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'n' is not defined

There is full support for floating point; operators with mixed type operands convert the integer operand to floating point:

>>> 3 * 3.75 / 1.5
7.5
>>> 7.0 / 2
3.5

Complex numbers are also supported; imaginary numbers are written with a suffix of j or J. Complex numbers with a nonzero real component are written as (real+imagj), or can be created with the complex(real, imag) function.

>>> 1j * 1J
(-1+0j)
>>> 1j * complex(0, 1)
(-1+0j)
>>> 3+1j*3
(3+3j)
>>> (3+1j)*3
(9+3j)
>>> (1+2j)/(1+1j)
(1.5+0.5j)

Complex numbers are always represented as two floating point numbers, the real and imaginary part. To extract these parts from a complex number z, use z.real and z.imag.

>>> a=1.5+0.5j
>>> a.real
1.5
>>> a.imag
0.5

The conversion functions to floating point and integer (float(), int()) don’t work for complex numbers — there is not one correct way to convert a complex number to a real number. Use abs(z) to get its magnitude (as a float) or z.real to get its real part:

>>> a=3.0+4.0j
>>> float(a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: can't convert complex to float; use abs(z)
>>> a.real
3.0
>>> a.imag
4.0
>>> abs(a)  # sqrt(a.real**2 + a.imag**2)
5.0
>>>

In interactive mode, the last printed expression is assigned to the variable _. This means that when you are using Python as a desk calculator, it is somewhat easier to continue calculations, for example:

>>> tax = 12.5 / 100
>>> price = 100.50
>>> price * tax
12.5625
>>> price + _
113.0625
>>> round(_, 2)
113.06
>>>

This variable should be treated as read-only by the user. Don’t explicitly assign a value to it — you would create an independent local variable with the same name masking the built-in variable with its magic behavior.

Strings¶

Besides numbers, Python can also manipulate strings, which can be expressed in several ways. They can be enclosed in single quotes or double quotes:

>>> 'spam eggs'
'spam eggs'
>>> 'doesn\'t'
"doesn't"
>>> "doesn't"
"doesn't"
>>> '"Yes," he said.'
'"Yes," he said.'
>>> "\"Yes,\" he said."
'"Yes," he said.'
>>> '"Isn\'t," she said.'
'"Isn\'t," she said.'

The interpreter prints the result of string operations in the same way as they are typed for input: inside quotes, and with quotes and other funny characters escaped by backslashes, to show the precise value. The string is enclosed in double quotes if the string contains a single quote and no double quotes, else it’s enclosed in single quotes. Once again, the print() function produces the more readable output.

String literals can span multiple lines in several ways. Continuation lines can be used, with a backslash as the last character on the line indicating that the next line is a logical continuation of the line:

hello = "This is a rather long string containing\n\
several lines of text just as you would do in C.\n\
    Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is\
 significant."

print(hello)

Note that newlines still need to be embedded in the string using \n; the newline following the trailing backslash is discarded. This example would print the following:

This is a rather long string containing
several lines of text just as you would do in C.
    Note that whitespace at the beginning of the line is significant.

If we make the string literal a “raw” string, however, the \n sequences are not converted to newlines, but the backslash at the end of the line, and the newline character in the source, are both included in the string as data. Thus, the example:

hello = r"This is a rather long string containing\n\
several lines of text much as you would do in C."

print(hello)

would print:

This is a rather long string containing\n\
several lines of text much as you would do in C.

Or, strings can be surrounded in a pair of matching triple-quotes: """ or '''. End of lines do not need to be escaped when using triple-quotes, but they will be included in the string.

print("""
Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to
""")

produces the following output:

Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to

Strings can be concatenated (glued together) with the + operator, and repeated with *:

>>> word = 'Help' + 'A'
>>> word
'HelpA'
>>> '<' + word*5 + '>'
'<HelpAHelpAHelpAHelpAHelpA>'

Two string literals next to each other are automatically concatenated; the first line above could also have been written word = 'Help' 'A'; this only works with two literals, not with arbitrary string expressions:

>>> 'str' 'ing'                   #  <-  This is ok
'string'
>>> 'str'.strip() + 'ing'   #  <-  This is ok
'string'
>>> 'str'.strip() 'ing'     #  <-  This is invalid
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
    'str'.strip() 'ing'
                      ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Strings can be subscripted (indexed); like in C, the first character of a string has subscript (index) 0. There is no separate character type; a character is simply a string of size one. As in the Icon programming language, substrings can be specified with the slice notation: two indices separated by a colon.

>>> word[4]
'A'
>>> word[0:2]
'He'
>>> word[2:4]
'lp'

Slice indices have useful defaults; an omitted first index defaults to zero, an omitted second index defaults to the size of the string being sliced.

>>> word[:2]    # The first two characters
'He'
>>> word[2:]    # Everything except the first two characters
'lpA'

Unlike a C string, Python strings cannot be changed. Assigning to an indexed position in the string results in an error:

>>> word[0] = 'x'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: 'str' object doesn't support item assignment
>>> word[:1] = 'Splat'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: 'str' object doesn't support slice assignment

However, creating a new string with the combined content is easy and efficient:

>>> 'x' + word[1:]
'xelpA'
>>> 'Splat' + word[4]
'SplatA'

Here’s a useful invariant of slice operations: s[:i] + s[i:] equals s.

>>> word[:2] + word[2:]
'HelpA'
>>> word[:3] + word[3:]
'HelpA'

Degenerate slice indices are handled gracefully: an index that is too large is replaced by the string size, an upper bound smaller than the lower bound returns an empty string.

>>> word[1:100]
'elpA'
>>> word[10:]
''
>>> word[2:1]
''

Indices may be negative numbers, to start counting from the right. For example:

>>> word[-1]     # The last character
'A'
>>> word[-2]     # The last-but-one character
'p'
>>> word[-2:]    # The last two characters
'pA'
>>> word[:-2]    # Everything except the last two characters
'Hel'

But note that -0 is really the same as 0, so it does not count from the right!

>>> word[-0]     # (since -0 equals 0)
'H'

Out-of-range negative slice indices are truncated, but don’t try this for single-element (non-slice) indices:

>>> word[-100:]
'HelpA'
>>> word[-10]    # error
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
IndexError: string index out of range

One way to remember how slices work is to think of the indices as pointing between characters, with the left edge of the first character numbered 0. Then the right edge of the last character of a string of n characters has index n, for example:

 +---+---+---+---+---+
 | H | e | l | p | A |
 +---+---+---+---+---+
 0   1   2   3   4   5
-5  -4  -3  -2  -1

The first row of numbers gives the position of the indices 0...5 in the string; the second row gives the corresponding negative indices. The slice from i to j consists of all characters between the edges labeled i and j, respectively.

For non-negative indices, the length of a slice is the difference of the indices, if both are within bounds. For example, the length of word[1:3] is 2.

The built-in function len() returns the length of a string:

>>> s = 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'
>>> len(s)
34

About Unicode¶

Starting with Python 3.0 all strings support Unicode (see http://www.unicode.org/).

Unicode has the advantage of providing one ordinal for every character in every script used in modern and ancient texts. Previously, there were only 256 possible ordinals for script characters. Texts were typically bound to a code page which mapped the ordinals to script characters. This lead to very much confusion especially with respect to internationalization (usually written as i18n — 'i' + 18 characters + 'n') of software. Unicode solves these problems by defining one code page for all scripts.

If you want to include special characters in a string, you can do so by using the Python Unicode-Escape encoding. The following example shows how:

>>> 'Hello\u0020World !'
'Hello World !'

The escape sequence \u0020 indicates to insert the Unicode character with the ordinal value 0x0020 (the space character) at the given position.

Other characters are interpreted by using their respective ordinal values directly as Unicode ordinals. If you have literal strings in the standard Latin-1 encoding that is used in many Western countries, you will find it convenient that the lower 256 characters of Unicode are the same as the 256 characters of Latin-1.

Apart from these standard encodings, Python provides a whole set of other ways of creating Unicode strings on the basis of a known encoding.

To convert a string into a sequence of bytes using a specific encoding, string objects provide an encode() method that takes one argument, the name of the encoding. Lowercase names for encodings are preferred.

>>> "Äpfel".encode('utf-8')
b'\xc3\x84pfel'

Lists¶

Python knows a number of compound data types, used to group together other values. The most versatile is the list, which can be written as a list of comma-separated values (items) between square brackets. List items need not all have the same type.

>>> a = ['spam', 'eggs', 100, 1234]
>>> a
['spam', 'eggs', 100, 1234]

Like string indices, list indices start at 0, and lists can be sliced, concatenated and so on:

>>> a[0]
'spam'
>>> a[3]
1234
>>> a[-2]
100
>>> a[1:-1]
['eggs', 100]
>>> a[:2] + ['bacon', 2*2]
['spam', 'eggs', 'bacon', 4]
>>> 3*a[:3] + ['Boo!']
['spam', 'eggs', 100, 'spam', 'eggs', 100, 'spam', 'eggs', 100, 'Boo!']

Unlike strings, which are immutable, it is possible to change individual elements of a list:

>>> a
['spam', 'eggs', 100, 1234]
>>> a[2] = a[2] + 23
>>> a
['spam', 'eggs', 123, 1234]

Assignment to slices is also possible, and this can even change the size of the list or clear it entirely:

>>> # Replace some items:
... a[0:2] = [1, 12]
>>> a
[1, 12, 123, 1234]
>>> # Remove some:
... a[0:2] = []
>>> a
[123, 1234]
>>> # Insert some:
... a[1:1] = ['bletch', 'xyzzy']
>>> a
[123, 'bletch', 'xyzzy', 1234]
>>> # Insert (a copy of) itself at the beginning
>>> a[:0] = a
>>> a
[123, 'bletch', 'xyzzy', 1234, 123, 'bletch', 'xyzzy', 1234]
>>> # Clear the list: replace all items with an empty list
>>> a[:] = []
>>> a
[]

The built-in function len() also applies to lists:

>>> a = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd']
>>> len(a)
4

It is possible to nest lists (create lists containing other lists), for example:

>>> q = [2, 3]
>>> p = [1, q, 4]
>>> len(p)
3
>>> p[1]
[2, 3]
>>> p[1][0]
2

You can add something to the end of the list:

>>> p[1].append('xtra')
>>> p
[1, [2, 3, 'xtra'], 4]
>>> q
[2, 3, 'xtra']

Note that in the last example, p[1] and q really refer to the same object! We’ll come back to object semantics later.