This question already has answers here:
How to get the size of a string in Python?
(6 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
we have just begun our unit on recursion, and I had a question regarding non-recursive functions and strings
I understand that strings are inherently recursive, as each character within a string has its own positive or negative index value, but I am a little unclear on how to create this function.
EDIT: Please disregard above text
What I meant to say:
I understand that a sequence is recursive in nature, that a string is a character followed by another string, just as a list is an element followed by another list.
Imagine we had a function called:
def flipside(s)
And when we input a string into our s parameter of the function, for example, the string:
'homework'
It takes the first half of the string (s) and moves it to the back while taking the second half of the string moving it the front, effectively generating the output:
'workhome'
I guess what I am having an issue with, is regarding string operations. If I do not know the length of s because it can take on any value due to it being a parameter, how do I create a non-recursive program to take 1//2 of s and move that half of the string to the back while simultaneously pushing the second half forward.
I have only gone so far as to set my base case:
def flipside(s):
if s == (''):
return 0
else:
fliprest =
return fliprest
Thank you, I would appreciate any information on the thought process behind your logic, or any feedback regarding any bad habits that I may be developing with how I have started off my code.
You can use slicing
def flipside(s):
return s[len(s)//2:] + s[:len(s)//2]
>>> flipside('homework')
'workhome'
This question already has answers here:
Slicing strings in str.format
(6 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
How can I do variable string slicing inside string.format like this.
"{0[:2]} Some text {0[2:4]} some text".format("123456")
Result I want result like this.
12 Some text 34 some text
You can't. Best you can do is limit how many characters of a string are printed (roughly equivalent to specifying a slice end), but you can't specify arbitrary start or end indices.
Save the data to a named variable and pass the slices to the format method, it's more readable, more intuitive, and easier for the parser to identify errors when they occur:
mystr = "123456"
"{} Some text {} some text".format(mystr[:2], mystr[2:4])
You could move some of the work from that to the format string if you really wanted to, but it's not a huge improvement (and in fact, involves larger temporaries when a slice ends up being needed anyway):
"{:.2s} Some text {:.2s} some text".format(mystr, mystr[2:])
This question already has answers here:
Format output string, right alignment
(8 answers)
Closed 8 years ago.
I have a tuple contains both string and float values (which are read from a txt file and calculated by me, respectively) and I want to write it to another txt file.
variables = (line.split()[0],line.split()[1], velocity) #velocity is a floating number, others are #string
output_file.write('%s %s %4.2f \n' % variables)
These lines are in a for loop. I want to align each variable in each line as right justified. How can I do that?
Please note that string items don't have same character in each line.
Python has several ways to format strings. In the form you use, you get right alignment by specifying a field length and optional padding. Python right aligns to fit the field length by default. Your float calculation already has a field length, so just decide on a length for the strings also. Its easy if you already have a max field size in mind. Here is an example of 10 spaces per string:
'%10s %10s %4.2f \n' % variables
I have a huge list of numbers (each number is less or equal to 6 numbers) in my database like that :
90494
898333
898
13
etc..
And I would like to have them formatted like that, using python :
090494
898333
000898
000013
etc...
Thanks a lot for your help
Standard python interpolation with C-style format modifiers should work:
print "%06d" % number
Or, if you prefer .format described in PEP 3101 (most likely the future of string formatting in python):
print '{0:06d}'.format(1)
Or, if you're working with strings, you can use zfill:
print '1'.zfill(6)
I was going through http://web2py.com/book/default/chapter/02 and found this:
>>> print 'number is ' + str(3)
number is 3
>>> print 'number is %s' % (3)
number is 3
>>> print 'number is %(number)s' % dict(number=3)
number is 3
It has been given that The last notation is more explicit and less error prone, and is to be preferred.
I am wondering what is the advantage of using the last notation.. will it not have a performance overhead?
>>> print 'number is ' + str(3)
number is 3
This is definitely the worst solution and might cause you problems if you do the beginner mistake "Value of obj: " + obj where obj is not a string or unicode object. For many concatenations, it's not readable at all - it's similar to something like echo "<p>Hello ".$username."!</p>"; in PHP (this can get arbitrarily ugly).
print 'number is %s' % (3)
number is 3
Now that is much better. Instead of a hard-to-read concatenation, you see the output format immediately. Coming back to the beginner mistake of outputting values, you can do print "Value of obj: %r" % obj, for example. I personally prefer this in most cases. But note that you cannot use it in gettext-translated strings if you have multiple format specifiers because the order might change in other languages.
As you forgot to mention it here, you can also use the new string formatting method which is similar:
>>> "number is {0}".format(3)
'number is 3'
Next, dict lookup:
>>> print 'number is %(number)s' % dict(number=3)
number is 3
As said before, gettext-translated strings might change the order of positional format specifiers, so this option is the best when working with translations. The performance drop should be negligible - if your program is not all about formatting strings.
As with the positional formatting, you can also do it in the new style:
>>> "number is {number}".format(number=3)
'number is 3'
It's hard to tell which one to take. I recommend you to use positional arguments with the % notation for simple strings and dict lookup formatting for translated strings.
I can think of a few differences.
First to me is cumbersome, if more than one variable is involved. I can not speak of performance penalty on that. See additional arguments below.
The second example is positional dependent and it can be easy to change position causing errors. It also does not tell you anything about the variables.
The third example, the position of variables is not important. You use a dictionary. This makes it elegant as it does not rely on positional structuring of variables.
See the example below:
>>> print 'number is %s %s' % (3,4)
number is 3 4
>>> print 'number is %s %s' % (4,3)
number is 4 3
>>> print 'number is %(number)s %(two)s' % dict(number=3, two=4)
number is 3 4
>>> print 'number is %(number)s %(two)s' % dict(two=4, number=3)
number is 3 4
>>>
Also another part of discussion on this
"+" is the string concatenation operator.
"%" is string formatting.
In this trivial case, string formatting accomplishes the same result as concatenation. Unlike string formatting, string concatenation only works when everything is already a string. So if you miss to convert your variables to string, concatenation will cause error.
[Edit: My answer was biased towards templating since the question came from web2py where templates are so commonly involved]
As Ryan says below, the concatenation is faster than formatting.
Suggestion is
Use the first form - concatenation, if you are concatenating just two strings
Use the second form, if there are few variables. You can invariably see the positions and deal with them
Use the third form when you are doing templating i.e. formatting a large piece of string with variable data. The dictionary form helps in providing meaning to variables inside the large piece of text.
I am wondering what is the advantage
of using the last notation..
Hm, as you said, the last notation is really more explicit and actually is less error prone.
will it not have a performance
overhead?
It will have little performance overhead, but it's minor if compared with data fetching from DB or network connections.
It's a bad, unjustified piece of advice.
The third method is cumbersome, violates DRY, and error prone, except if:
You are writing a framework which don't have control over the format string. For example, logging module, web2py, or gettext.
The format string is extremely long.
The format string is read from a file from a config file.
The problem with the third method should be obvious when you consider that foo appears three times in this code: "%(foo)s" % dict(foo=foo). This is error prone. Most programs should not use the third method, unless they know they need to.
The second method is the simplest method, and is what you generally use in most programs. It is best used when the format string is immediate, e.g. 'values: %s %s %s' % (a, b, c) instead of taken from a variable, e.g. fmt % (a, b, c).
The first concatenation is almost never useful, except perhaps if you're building list by loops:
s = ''
for x in l:
s += str(x)
however, in that case, it's generally better and faster to use str.join():
s = ''.join(str(x) for x in l)