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The Python Tutorial

Python is an easy to learn, powerful programming language. It has efficient high-level data structures and a simple but effective
approach to object-oriented programming. Python’s elegant syntax and dynamic typing, together with its interpreted nature,
make it an ideal language for scripting and rapid application development in many areas on most platforms.

The Python interpreter and the extensive standard library are freely available in source or binary form for all major platforms
from the Python web site, https://www.python.org/, and may be freely distributed. The same site also contains distributions of
and pointers to many free third party Python modules, programs and tools, and additional documentation.

The Python interpreter is easily extended with new functions and data types implemented in C or C++ (or other languages
callable from C). Python is also suitable as an extension language for customizable applications.

This tutorial introduces the reader informally to the basic concepts and features of the Python language and system. It helps to
have a Python interpreter handy for hands-on experience, but all examples are self-contained, so the tutorial can be read off-line
as well.

For a description of standard objects and modules, see The Python Standard Library. The Python Language Reference gives a
more formal definition of the language. To write extensions in C or C++, read Extending and Embedding the Python Interpreter
and Python/C API Reference Manual. There are also several books covering Python in depth.

This tutorial does not attempt to be comprehensive and cover every single feature, or even every commonly used feature.
Instead, it introduces many of Python’s most noteworthy features, and will give you a good idea of the language’s flavor and
style. After reading it, you will be able to read and write Python modules and programs, and you will be ready to learn more
about the various Python library modules described in The Python Standard Library.

The Glossary is also worth going through.

• 1. Whetting Your Appetite

• 2. Using the Python Interpreter
◦ 2.1. Invoking the Interpreter
◾ 2.1.1. Argument Passing
◾ 2.1.2. Interactive Mode
◦ 2.2. The Interpreter and Its Environment
◾ 2.2.1. Source Code Encoding
• 3. An Informal Introduction to Python
◦ 3.1. Using Python as a Calculator

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◾ 3.1.1. Numbers
◾ 3.1.2. Strings
◾ 3.1.3. Lists
◦ 3.2. First Steps Towards Programming
• 4. More Control Flow Tools
◦ 4.1. if Statements
◦ 4.2. for Statements
◦ 4.3. The range() Function
◦ 4.4. break and continue Statements, and else Clauses on Loops
◦ 4.5. pass Statements
◦ 4.6. match Statements
◦ 4.7. Defining Functions
◦ 4.8. More on Defining Functions
◾ 4.8.1. Default Argument Values
◾ 4.8.2. Keyword Arguments
◾ 4.8.3. Special parameters
◾ 4.8.3.1. Positional-or-Keyword Arguments
◾ 4.8.3.2. Positional-Only Parameters
◾ 4.8.3.3. Keyword-Only Arguments
◾ 4.8.3.4. Function Examples
◾ 4.8.3.5. Recap
◾ 4.8.4. Arbitrary Argument Lists
◾ 4.8.5. Unpacking Argument Lists
◾ 4.8.6. Lambda Expressions
◾ 4.8.7. Documentation Strings
◾ 4.8.8. Function Annotations
◦ 4.9. Intermezzo: Coding Style
• 5. Data Structures
◦ 5.1. More on Lists
◾ 5.1.1. Using Lists as Stacks
◾ 5.1.2. Using Lists as Queues
◾ 5.1.3. List Comprehensions
◾ 5.1.4. Nested List Comprehensions
◦ 5.2. The del statement
◦ 5.3. Tuples and Sequences
◦ 5.4. Sets
◦ 5.5. Dictionaries
◦ 5.6. Looping Techniques
◦ 5.7. More on Conditions
◦ 5.8. Comparing Sequences and Other Types
• 6. Modules
◦ 6.1. More on Modules
◾ 6.1.1. Executing modules as scripts
◾ 6.1.2. The Module Search Path
◾ 6.1.3. “Compiled” Python files
◦ 6.2. Standard Modules
◦ 6.3. The dir() Function
◦ 6.4. Packages
◾ 6.4.1. Importing * From a Package
◾ 6.4.2. Intra-package References
◾ 6.4.3. Packages in Multiple Directories
• 7. Input and Output
◦ 7.1. Fancier Output Formatting
◾ 7.1.1. Formatted String Literals
◾ 7.1.2. The String format() Method
◾ 7.1.3. Manual String Formatting
◾ 7.1.4. Old string formatting
◦ 7.2. Reading and Writing Files
◾ 7.2.1. Methods of File Objects
◾ 7.2.2. Saving structured data with json
• 8. Errors and Exceptions
◦ 8.1. Syntax Errors
◦ 8.2. Exceptions
◦ 8.3. Handling Exceptions
◦ 8.4. Raising Exceptions
◦ 8.5. Exception Chaining

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◦ 8.6. User-defined Exceptions

◦ 8.7. Defining Clean-up Actions
◦ 8.8. Predefined Clean-up Actions
• 9. Classes
◦ 9.1. A Word About Names and Objects
◦ 9.2. Python Scopes and Namespaces
◾ 9.2.1. Scopes and Namespaces Example
◦ 9.3. A First Look at Classes
◾ 9.3.1. Class Definition Syntax
◾ 9.3.2. Class Objects
◾ 9.3.3. Instance Objects
◾ 9.3.4. Method Objects
◾ 9.3.5. Class and Instance Variables
◦ 9.4. Random Remarks
◦ 9.5. Inheritance
◾ 9.5.1. Multiple Inheritance
◦ 9.6. Private Variables
◦ 9.7. Odds and Ends
◦ 9.8. Iterators
◦ 9.9. Generators
◦ 9.10. Generator Expressions
• 10. Brief Tour of the Standard Library
◦ 10.1. Operating System Interface
◦ 10.2. File Wildcards
◦ 10.3. Command Line Arguments
◦ 10.4. Error Output Redirection and Program Termination
◦ 10.5. String Pattern Matching
◦ 10.6. Mathematics
◦ 10.7. Internet Access
◦ 10.8. Dates and Times
◦ 10.9. Data Compression
◦ 10.10. Performance Measurement
◦ 10.11. Quality Control
◦ 10.12. Batteries Included
• 11. Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II
◦ 11.1. Output Formatting
◦ 11.2. Templating
◦ 11.3. Working with Binary Data Record Layouts
◦ 11.4. Multi-threading
◦ 11.5. Logging
◦ 11.6. Weak References
◦ 11.7. Tools for Working with Lists
◦ 11.8. Decimal Floating Point Arithmetic
• 12. Virtual Environments and Packages
◦ 12.1. Introduction
◦ 12.2. Creating Virtual Environments
◦ 12.3. Managing Packages with pip
• 13. What Now?
• 14. Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution
◦ 14.1. Tab Completion and History Editing
◦ 14.2. Alternatives to the Interactive Interpreter
• 15. Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations
◦ 15.1. Representation Error
• 16. Appendix
◦ 16.1. Interactive Mode
◾ 16.1.1. Error Handling
◾ 16.1.2. Executable Python Scripts
◾ 16.1.3. The Interactive Startup File
◾ 16.1.4. The Customization Modules

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• Python »
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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
See History and License for more information.

The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate.

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1. Whetting Your Appetite

If you do much work on computers, eventually you find that there’s some task you’d like to automate. For example, you may
wish to perform a search-and-replace over a large number of text files, or rename and rearrange a bunch of photo files in a
complicated way. Perhaps you’d like to write a small custom database, or a specialized GUI application, or a simple game.

If you’re a professional software developer, you may have to work with several C/C++/Java libraries but find the usual
write/compile/test/re-compile cycle is too slow. Perhaps you’re writing a test suite for such a library and find writing the testing
code a tedious task. Or maybe you’ve written a program that could use an extension language, and you don’t want to design and
implement a whole new language for your application.

Python is just the language for you.

You could write a Unix shell script or Windows batch files for some of these tasks, but shell scripts are best at moving around
files and changing text data, not well-suited for GUI applications or games. You could write a C/C++/Java program, but it can
take a lot of development time to get even a first-draft program. Python is simpler to use, available on Windows, macOS, and
Unix operating systems, and will help you get the job done more quickly.

Python is simple to use, but it is a real programming language, offering much more structure and support for large programs than
shell scripts or batch files can offer. On the other hand, Python also offers much more error checking than C, and, being a very-
high-level language, it has high-level data types built in, such as flexible arrays and dictionaries. Because of its more general

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data types Python is applicable to a much larger problem domain than Awk or even Perl, yet many things are at least as easy in
Python as in those languages.

Python allows you to split your program into modules that can be reused in other Python programs. It comes with a large
collection of standard modules that you can use as the basis of your programs — or as examples to start learning to program in
Python. Some of these modules provide things like file I/O, system calls, sockets, and even interfaces to graphical user interface
toolkits like Tk.

Python is an interpreted language, which can save you considerable time during program development because no compilation
and linking is necessary. The interpreter can be used interactively, which makes it easy to experiment with features of the
language, to write throw-away programs, or to test functions during bottom-up program development. It is also a handy desk
calculator.

Python enables programs to be written compactly and readably. Programs written in Python are typically much shorter than
equivalent C, C++, or Java programs, for several reasons:

• the high-level data types allow you to express complex operations in a single statement;
• statement grouping is done by indentation instead of beginning and ending brackets;
• no variable or argument declarations are necessary.

Python is extensible: if you know how to program in C it is easy to add a new built-in function or module to the interpreter,
either to perform critical operations at maximum speed, or to link Python programs to libraries that may only be available in
binary form (such as a vendor-specific graphics library). Once you are really hooked, you can link the Python interpreter into an
application written in C and use it as an extension or command language for that application.

By the way, the language is named after the BBC show “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and has nothing to do with reptiles.
Making references to Monty Python skits in documentation is not only allowed, it is encouraged!

Now that you are all excited about Python, you’ll want to examine it in some more detail. Since the best way to learn a language
is to use it, the tutorial invites you to play with the Python interpreter as you read.

In the next chapter, the mechanics of using the interpreter are explained. This is rather mundane information, but essential for
trying out the examples shown later.

The rest of the tutorial introduces various features of the Python language and system through examples, beginning with simple
expressions, statements and data types, through functions and modules, and finally touching upon advanced concepts like
exceptions and user-defined classes.

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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
See History and License for more information.

The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate.

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• 2. Using the Python Interpreter

◦ 2.1. Invoking the Interpreter
◾ 2.1.1. Argument Passing

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◾ 2.1.2. Interactive Mode

◦ 2.2. The Interpreter and Its Environment
◾ 2.2.1. Source Code Encoding

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2. Using the Python Interpreter

2.1. Invoking the Interpreter
The Python interpreter is usually installed as /usr/local/bin/python3.10 on those machines where it is available;
putting /usr/local/bin in your Unix shell’s search path makes it possible to start it by typing the command:
python3.10

to the shell. [1] Since the choice of the directory where the interpreter lives is an installation option, other places are possible;
check with your local Python guru or system administrator. (E.g., /usr/local/python is a popular alternative location.)

On Windows machines where you have installed Python from the Microsoft Store, the python3.10 command will be available.
If you have the py.exe launcher installed, you can use the py command. See Excursus: Setting environment variables for other
ways to launch Python.

Typing an end-of-file character (Control-D on Unix, Control-Z on Windows) at the primary prompt causes the interpreter to
exit with a zero exit status. If that doesn’t work, you can exit the interpreter by typing the following command: quit().

The interpreter’s line-editing features include interactive editing, history substitution and code completion on systems that
support the GNU Readline library. Perhaps the quickest check to see whether command line editing is supported is typing
Control-P to the first Python prompt you get. If it beeps, you have command line editing; see Appendix Interactive Input
Editing and History Substitution for an introduction to the keys. If nothing appears to happen, or if ^P is echoed, command line
editing isn’t available; you’ll only be able to use backspace to remove characters from the current line.

The interpreter operates somewhat like the Unix shell: when called with standard input connected to a tty device, it reads and
executes commands interactively; when called with a file name argument or with a file as standard input, it reads and executes a
script from that file.

A second way of starting the interpreter is python -c command [arg] ..., which executes the statement(s) in command,
analogous to the shell’s -c option. Since Python statements often contain spaces or other characters that are special to the shell,
it is usually advised to quote command in its entirety with single quotes.

Some Python modules are also useful as scripts. These can be invoked using python -m module [arg] ..., which executes
the source file for module as if you had spelled out its full name on the command line.

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When a script file is used, it is sometimes useful to be able to run the script and enter interactive mode afterwards. This can be
done by passing -i before the script.

All command line options are described in Command line and environment.

2.1.1. Argument Passing

When known to the interpreter, the script name and additional arguments thereafter are turned into a list of strings and assigned
to the argv variable in the sys module. You can access this list by executing import sys. The length of the list is at least one;
when no script and no arguments are given, sys.argv[0] is an empty string. When the script name is given as '-' (meaning
standard input), sys.argv[0] is set to '-'. When -c command is used, sys.argv[0] is set to '-c'. When -m module is used,
sys.argv[0] is set to the full name of the located module. Options found after -c command or -m module are not consumed by
the Python interpreter’s option processing but left in sys.argv for the command or module to handle.

2.1.2. Interactive Mode

When commands are read from a tty, the interpreter is said to be in interactive mode. In this mode it prompts for the next
command with the primary prompt, usually three greater-than signs (>>>); for continuation lines it prompts with the secondary
prompt, by default three dots (...). The interpreter prints a welcome message stating its version number and a copyright notice
before printing the first prompt:
$ python3.10
Python 3.10 (default, June 4 2019, 09:25:04)
[GCC 4.8.2] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Continuation lines are needed when entering a multi-line construct. As an example, take a look at this if statement:
>>> the_world_is_flat = True
>>> if the_world_is_flat:
... print("Be careful not to fall off!")
...
Be careful not to fall off!

For more on interactive mode, see Interactive Mode.

2.2. The Interpreter and Its Environment

2.2.1. Source Code Encoding

By default, Python source files are treated as encoded in UTF-8. In that encoding, characters of most languages in the world can
be used simultaneously in string literals, identifiers and comments — although the standard library only uses ASCII characters
for identifiers, a convention that any portable code should follow. To display all these characters properly, your editor must
recognize that the file is UTF-8, and it must use a font that supports all the characters in the file.

To declare an encoding other than the default one, a special comment line should be added as the first line of the file. The syntax
is as follows:
# -*- coding: encoding -*-

where encoding is one of the valid codecs supported by Python.

For example, to declare that Windows-1252 encoding is to be used, the first line of your source code file should be:
# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-

One exception to the first line rule is when the source code starts with a UNIX “shebang” line. In this case, the encoding
declaration should be added as the second line of the file. For example:
#!/usr/bin/env python3
# -*- coding: cp1252 -*-

Footnotes

[1] On Unix, the Python 3.x interpreter is by default not installed with the executable named python, so that it does not conflict
with a simultaneously installed Python 2.x executable.

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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
See History and License for more information.

The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate.

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Table of Contents

• 3. An Informal Introduction to Python

◦ 3.1. Using Python as a Calculator
◾ 3.1.1. Numbers
◾ 3.1.2. Strings
◾ 3.1.3. Lists
◦ 3.2. First Steps Towards Programming

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3. An Informal Introduction to Python

In the following examples, input and output are distinguished by the presence or absence of prompts (>>> and …): to repeat the
example, you must type everything after the prompt, when the prompt appears; lines that do not begin with a prompt are output
from the interpreter. Note that a secondary prompt on a line by itself in an example means you must type a blank line; this is
used to end a multi-line command.

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Many of the examples in this manual, even those entered at the interactive prompt, include comments. Comments in Python start
with the hash character, #, and extend to the end of the physical line. A comment may appear at the start of a line or following
whitespace or code, but not within a string literal. A hash character within a string literal is just a hash character. Since
comments are to clarify code and are not interpreted by Python, they may be omitted when typing in examples.

Some examples:
# this is the first comment
spam = 1 # and this is the second comment
# ... and now a third!
text = "# This is not a comment because it's inside quotes."

3.1. Using Python as a Calculator

Let’s try some simple Python commands. Start the interpreter and wait for the primary prompt, >>>. (It shouldn’t take long.)

3.1.1. 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
>>> 50 - 5*6
20
>>> (50 - 5*6) / 4
5.0
>>> 8 / 5 # division always returns a floating point number
1.6

The integer numbers (e.g. 2, 4, 20) have type int, the ones with a fractional part (e.g. 5.0, 1.6) have type float. We will see
more about numeric types later in the tutorial.

Division (/) always returns a float. To do floor division and get an integer result (discarding any fractional result) you can use
the // operator; to calculate the remainder you can use %:
>>> 17 / 3 # classic division returns a float
5.666666666666667
>>>
>>> 17 // 3 # floor division discards the fractional part
5
>>> 17 % 3 # the % operator returns the remainder of the division
2
>>> 5 * 3 + 2 # floored quotient * divisor + remainder
17

With Python, it is possible to use the ** operator to calculate powers [1]:

>>> 5 ** 2 # 5 squared
25
>>> 2 ** 7 # 2 to the power of 7
128

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

If a variable is not “defined” (assigned a value), trying to use it will give you an error:
>>> n # try to access an undefined variable
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:
>>> 4 * 3.75 - 1
14.0

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:

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>>> 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.

In addition to int and float, Python supports other types of numbers, such as Decimal and Fraction. Python also has built-in
support for complex numbers, and uses the j or J suffix to indicate the imaginary part (e.g. 3+5j).

3.1.2. 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 ("...") with the same result [2]. \ can be used to escape quotes:
>>> 'spam eggs' # single quotes
'spam eggs'
>>> 'doesn\'t' # use \' to escape the single quote...
"doesn't"
>>> "doesn't" # ...or use double quotes instead
"doesn't"
>>> '"Yes," they said.'
'"Yes," they said.'
>>> "\"Yes,\" they said."
'"Yes," they said.'
>>> '"Isn\'t," they said.'
'"Isn\'t," they said.'

In the interactive interpreter, the output string is enclosed in quotes and special characters are escaped with backslashes. While
this might sometimes look different from the input (the enclosing quotes could change), the two strings are equivalent. The
string is enclosed in double quotes if the string contains a single quote and no double quotes, otherwise it is enclosed in single
quotes. The print() function produces a more readable output, by omitting the enclosing quotes and by printing escaped and
special characters:
>>> '"Isn\'t," they said.'
'"Isn\'t," they said.'
>>> print('"Isn\'t," they said.')
"Isn't," they said.
>>> s = 'First line.\nSecond line.' # \n means newline
>>> s # without print(), \n is included in the output
'First line.\nSecond line.'
>>> print(s) # with print(), \n produces a new line
First line.
Second line.

If you don’t want characters prefaced by \ to be interpreted as special characters, you can use raw strings by adding an r before
the first quote:
>>> print('C:\some\name') # here \n means newline!
C:\some
ame
>>> print(r'C:\some\name') # note the r before the quote
C:\some\name

String literals can span multiple lines. One way is using triple-quotes: """...""" or '''...'''. End of lines are automatically
included in the string, but it’s possible to prevent this by adding a \ at the end of the line. The following example:
print("""\
Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
-h Display this usage message
-H hostname Hostname to connect to
""")

produces the following output (note that the initial newline is not included):
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 *:

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>>> # 3 times 'un', followed by 'ium'

>>> 3 * 'un' + 'ium'
'unununium'

Two or more string literals (i.e. the ones enclosed between quotes) next to each other are automatically concatenated.
>>> 'Py' 'thon'
'Python'

This feature is particularly useful when you want to break long strings:
>>> text = ('Put several strings within parentheses '
... 'to have them joined together.')
>>> text
'Put several strings within parentheses to have them joined together.'

This only works with two literals though, not with variables or expressions:
>>> prefix = 'Py'
>>> prefix 'thon' # can't concatenate a variable and a string literal
File "<stdin>", line 1
prefix 'thon'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> ('un' * 3) 'ium'
File "<stdin>", line 1
('un' * 3) 'ium'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

If you want to concatenate variables or a variable and a literal, use +:

>>> prefix + 'thon'
'Python'

Strings can be indexed (subscripted), with the first character having index 0. There is no separate character type; a character is
simply a string of size one:
>>> word = 'Python'
>>> word[0] # character in position 0
'P'
>>> word[5] # character in position 5
'n'

Indices may also be negative numbers, to start counting from the right:
>>> word[-1] # last character
'n'
>>> word[-2] # second-last character
'o'
>>> word[-6]
'P'

Note that since -0 is the same as 0, negative indices start from -1.

In addition to indexing, slicing is also supported. While indexing is used to obtain individual characters, slicing allows you to
obtain substring:
>>> word[0:2] # characters from position 0 (included) to 2 (excluded)
'Py'
>>> word[2:5] # characters from position 2 (included) to 5 (excluded)
'tho'

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] # character from the beginning to position 2 (excluded)
'Py'
>>> word[4:] # characters from position 4 (included) to the end
'on'
>>> word[-2:] # characters from the second-last (included) to the end
'on'

Note how the start is always included, and the end always excluded. This makes sure that s[:i] + s[i:] is always equal to s:
>>> word[:2] + word[2:]
'Python'
>>> word[:4] + word[4:]
'Python'

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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:
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| P | y | t | h | o | n |
+---+---+---+---+---+---+
0 1 2 3 4 5 6
-6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1

The first row of numbers gives the position of the indices 0…6 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.

Attempting to use an index that is too large will result in an error:

>>> word[42] # the word only has 6 characters
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: string index out of range

However, out of range slice indexes are handled gracefully when used for slicing:
>>> word[4:42]
'on'
>>> word[42:]
''

Python strings cannot be changed — they are immutable. Therefore, assigning to an indexed position in the string results in an
error:
>>> word[0] = 'J'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
>>> word[2:] = 'py'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment

If you need a different string, you should create a new one:

>>> 'J' + word[1:]
'Jython'
>>> word[:2] + 'py'
'Pypy'

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

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

See also

Text Sequence Type — str

Strings are examples of sequence types, and support the common operations supported by such types.
String Methods
Strings support a large number of methods for basic transformations and searching.
Formatted string literals
String literals that have embedded expressions.
Format String Syntax
Information about string formatting with str.format().
printf-style String Formatting
The old formatting operations invoked when strings are the left operand of the % operator are described in more detail
here.

3.1.3. 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. Lists might contain items of different types, but
usually the items all have the same type.

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>>> squares = [1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

>>> squares
[1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

Like strings (and all other built-in sequence types), lists can be indexed and sliced:
>>> squares[0] # indexing returns the item
1
>>> squares[-1]
25
>>> squares[-3:] # slicing returns a new list
[9, 16, 25]

All slice operations return a new list containing the requested elements. This means that the following slice returns a shallow
copy of the list:
>>> squares[:]
[1, 4, 9, 16, 25]

Lists also support operations like concatenation:

>>> squares + [36, 49, 64, 81, 100]
[1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100]

Unlike strings, which are immutable, lists are a mutable type, i.e. it is possible to change their content:
>>> cubes = [1, 8, 27, 65, 125] # something's wrong here
>>> 4 ** 3 # the cube of 4 is 64, not 65!
64
>>> cubes[3] = 64 # replace the wrong value
>>> cubes
[1, 8, 27, 64, 125]

You can also add new items at the end of the list, by using the append() method (we will see more about methods later):
>>> cubes.append(216) # add the cube of 6
>>> cubes.append(7 ** 3) # and the cube of 7
>>> cubes
[1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343]

Assignment to slices is also possible, and this can even change the size of the list or clear it entirely:
>>> letters = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
>>> letters
['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g']
>>> # replace some values
>>> letters[2:5] = ['C', 'D', 'E']
>>> letters
['a', 'b', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'f', 'g']
>>> # now remove them
>>> letters[2:5] = []
>>> letters
['a', 'b', 'f', 'g']
>>> # clear the list by replacing all the elements with an empty list
>>> letters[:] = []
>>> letters
[]

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

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

It is possible to nest lists (create lists containing other lists), for example:
>>> a = ['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> n = [1, 2, 3]
>>> x = [a, n]
>>> x
[['a', 'b', 'c'], [1, 2, 3]]
>>> x[0]
['a', 'b', 'c']
>>> x[0][1]
'b'

3.2. First Steps Towards Programming

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Of course, we can use Python for more complicated tasks than adding two and two together. For instance, we can write an initial
sub-sequence of the Fibonacci series as follows:
>>> # Fibonacci series:
... # the sum of two elements defines the next
... a, b = 0, 1
>>> while a < 10:
... print(a)
... a, b = b, a+b
...
0
1
1
2
3
5
8

This example introduces several new features.

• The first line contains a multiple assignment: the variables a and b simultaneously get the new values 0 and 1. On the last
line this is used again, demonstrating that the expressions on the right-hand side are all evaluated first before any of the
assignments take place. The right-hand side expressions are evaluated from the left to the right.

• The while loop executes as long as the condition (here: a < 10) remains true. In Python, like in C, any non-zero integer
value is true; zero is false. The condition may also be a string or list value, in fact any sequence; anything with a non-zero
length is true, empty sequences are false. The test used in the example is a simple comparison. The standard comparison
operators are written the same as in C: < (less than), > (greater than), == (equal to), <= (less than or equal to), >= (greater
than or equal to) and != (not equal to).

• The body of the loop is indented: indentation is Python’s way of grouping statements. At the interactive prompt, you have
to type a tab or space(s) for each indented line. In practice you will prepare more complicated input for Python with a text
editor; all decent text editors have an auto-indent facility. When a compound statement is entered interactively, it must be
followed by a blank line to indicate completion (since the parser cannot guess when you have typed the last line). Note
that each line within a basic block must be indented by the same amount.

• The print() function writes the value of the argument(s) it is given. It differs from just writing the expression you want
to write (as we did earlier in the calculator examples) in the way it handles multiple arguments, floating point quantities,
and strings. Strings are printed without quotes, and a space is inserted between items, so you can format things nicely, like
this:
>>> i = 256*256
>>> print('The value of i is', i)
The value of i is 65536

The keyword argument end can be used to avoid the newline after the output, or end the output with a different string:
>>> a, b = 0, 1
>>> while a < 1000:
... print(a, end=',')
... a, b = b, a+b
...
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610,987,

Footnotes

[1] Since ** has higher precedence than -, -3**2 will be interpreted as -(3**2) and thus result in -9. To avoid this and get 9,
you can use (-3)**2.
[2] Unlike other languages, special characters such as \n have the same meaning with both single ('...') and double ("...")
quotes. The only difference between the two is that within single quotes you don’t need to escape " (but you have to escape
\') and vice versa.

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• previous |
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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
See History and License for more information.

The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate.

Last updated on Oct 04, 2021. Found a bug?

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Table of Contents

• 4. More Control Flow Tools

◦ 4.1. if Statements
◦ 4.2. for Statements
◦ 4.3. The range() Function
◦ 4.4. break and continue Statements, and else Clauses on Loops
◦ 4.5. pass Statements
◦ 4.6. match Statements
◦ 4.7. Defining Functions
◦ 4.8. More on Defining Functions
◾ 4.8.1. Default Argument Values
◾ 4.8.2. Keyword Arguments
◾ 4.8.3. Special parameters
◾ 4.8.3.1. Positional-or-Keyword Arguments
◾ 4.8.3.2. Positional-Only Parameters
◾ 4.8.3.3. Keyword-Only Arguments
◾ 4.8.3.4. Function Examples
◾ 4.8.3.5. Recap
◾ 4.8.4. Arbitrary Argument Lists
◾ 4.8.5. Unpacking Argument Lists
◾ 4.8.6. Lambda Expressions
◾ 4.8.7. Documentation Strings
◾ 4.8.8. Function Annotations
◦ 4.9. Intermezzo: Coding Style

Previous topic

3. An Informal Introduction to Python

Next topic

5. Data Structures

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4. More Control Flow Tools

Besides the while statement just introduced, Python uses the usual flow control statements known from other languages, with
some twists.

4.1. if Statements
Perhaps the most well-known statement type is the if statement. For example:
>>> x = int(input("Please enter an integer: "))
Please enter an integer: 42
>>> if x < 0:
... x = 0
... print('Negative changed to zero')
... elif x == 0:
... print('Zero')
... elif x == 1:
... print('Single')
... else:
... print('More')
...
More

There can be zero or more elif parts, and the else part is optional. The keyword ‘elif’ is short for ‘else if’, and is useful to
avoid excessive indentation. An if … elif … elif … sequence is a substitute for the switch or case statements found in
other languages.

If you’re comparing the same value to several constants, or checking for specific types or attributes, you may also find the match
statement useful. For more details see match Statements.

4.2. for Statements

The for statement in Python differs a bit from what you may be used to in C or Pascal. Rather than always iterating over an
arithmetic progression of numbers (like in Pascal), or giving the user the ability to define both the iteration step and halting
condition (as C), Python’s for statement iterates over the items of any sequence (a list or a string), in the order that they appear
in the sequence. For example (no pun intended):
>>> # Measure some strings:
... words = ['cat', 'window', 'defenestrate']
>>> for w in words:
... print(w, len(w))
...
cat 3
window 6
defenestrate 12

Code that modifies a collection while iterating over that same collection can be tricky to get right. Instead, it is usually more
straight-forward to loop over a copy of the collection or to create a new collection:
# Create a sample collection
users = {'Hans': 'active', 'Éléonore': 'inactive', '景太郎': 'active'}

# Strategy: Iterate over a copy

for user, status in users.copy().items():
if status == 'inactive':
del users[user]

# Strategy: Create a new collection

active_users = {}
for user, status in users.items():
if status == 'active':
active_users[user] = status

4.3. The range() Function

If you do need to iterate over a sequence of numbers, the built-in function range() comes in handy. It generates arithmetic
progressions:
>>> for i in range(5):
... print(i)
...
0
1

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2
3
4

The given end point is never part of the generated sequence; range(10) generates 10 values, the legal indices for items of a
sequence of length 10. It is possible to let the range start at another number, or to specify a different increment (even negative;
sometimes this is called the ‘step’):
>>> list(range(5, 10))
[5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

>>> list(range(0, 10, 3))

[0, 3, 6, 9]

>>> list(range(-10, -100, -30))

[-10, -40, -70]

To iterate over the indices of a sequence, you can combine range() and len() as follows:
>>> a = ['Mary', 'had', 'a', 'little', 'lamb']
>>> for i in range(len(a)):
... print(i, a[i])
...
0 Mary
1 had
2 a
3 little
4 lamb

In most such cases, however, it is convenient to use the enumerate() function, see Looping Techniques.

A strange thing happens if you just print a range:

>>> range(10)
range(0, 10)

In many ways the object returned by range() behaves as if it is a list, but in fact it isn’t. It is an object which returns the
successive items of the desired sequence when you iterate over it, but it doesn’t really make the list, thus saving space.

We say such an object is iterable, that is, suitable as a target for functions and constructs that expect something from which they
can obtain successive items until the supply is exhausted. We have seen that the for statement is such a construct, while an
example of a function that takes an iterable is sum():
>>> sum(range(4)) # 0 + 1 + 2 + 3
6

Later we will see more functions that return iterables and take iterables as arguments. In chapter Data Structures, we will discuss
in more detail about list().

4.4. break and continue Statements, and else Clauses on Loops

The break statement, like in C, breaks out of the innermost enclosing for or while loop.

Loop statements may have an else clause; it is executed when the loop terminates through exhaustion of the iterable (with for)
or when the condition becomes false (with while), but not when the loop is terminated by a break statement. This is
exemplified by the following loop, which searches for prime numbers:
>>> for n in range(2, 10):
... for x in range(2, n):
... if n % x == 0:
... print(n, 'equals', x, '*', n//x)
... break
... else:
... # loop fell through without finding a factor
... print(n, 'is a prime number')
...
2 is a prime number
3 is a prime number
4 equals 2 * 2
5 is a prime number
6 equals 2 * 3
7 is a prime number
8 equals 2 * 4
9 equals 3 * 3

(Yes, this is the correct code. Look closely: the else clause belongs to the for loop, not the if statement.)

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When used with a loop, the else clause has more in common with the else clause of a try statement than it does with that of if
statements: a try statement’s else clause runs when no exception occurs, and a loop’s else clause runs when no break occurs.
For more on the try statement and exceptions, see Handling Exceptions.

The continue statement, also borrowed from C, continues with the next iteration of the loop:
>>> for num in range(2, 10):
... if num % 2 == 0:
... print("Found an even number", num)
... continue
... print("Found an odd number", num)
...
Found an even number 2
Found an odd number 3
Found an even number 4
Found an odd number 5
Found an even number 6
Found an odd number 7
Found an even number 8
Found an odd number 9

4.5. pass Statements

The pass statement does nothing. It can be used when a statement is required syntactically but the program requires no action.
For example:
>>> while True:
... pass # Busy-wait for keyboard interrupt (Ctrl+C)
...

This is commonly used for creating minimal classes:

>>> class MyEmptyClass:
... pass
...

Another place pass can be used is as a place-holder for a function or conditional body when you are working on new code,
allowing you to keep thinking at a more abstract level. The pass is silently ignored:
>>> def initlog(*args):
... pass # Remember to implement this!
...

4.6. match Statements

A match statement takes an expression and compares its value to successive patterns given as one or more case blocks. This is
superficially similar to a switch statement in C, Java or JavaScript (and many other languages), but it can also extract
components (sequence elements or object attributes) from the value into variables.

The simplest form compares a subject value against one or more literals:
def http_error(status):
match status:
case 400:
return "Bad request"
case 404:
return "Not found"
case 418:
return "I'm a teapot"
case _:
return "Something's wrong with the internet"

Note the last block: the “variable name” _ acts as a wildcard and never fails to match. If no case matches, none of the branches is
executed.

You can combine several literals in a single pattern using | (“or”):

case 401 | 403 | 404:
return "Not allowed"

Patterns can look like unpacking assignments, and can be used to bind variables:
# point is an (x, y) tuple
match point:
case (0, 0):
print("Origin")

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case (0, y):

print(f"Y={y}")
case (x, 0):
print(f"X={x}")
case (x, y):
print(f"X={x}, Y={y}")
case _:
raise ValueError("Not a point")

Study that one carefully! The first pattern has two literals, and can be thought of as an extension of the literal pattern shown
above. But the next two patterns combine a literal and a variable, and the variable binds a value from the subject (point). The
fourth pattern captures two values, which makes it conceptually similar to the unpacking assignment (x, y) = point.

If you are using classes to structure your data you can use the class name followed by an argument list resembling a constructor,
but with the ability to capture attributes into variables:
class Point:
x: int
y: int

def where_is(point):
match point:
case Point(x=0, y=0):
print("Origin")
case Point(x=0, y=y):
print(f"Y={y}")
case Point(x=x, y=0):
print(f"X={x}")
case Point():
print("Somewhere else")
case _:
print("Not a point")

You can use positional parameters with some builtin classes that provide an ordering for their attributes (e.g. dataclasses). You
can also define a specific position for attributes in patterns by setting the __match_args__ special attribute in your classes. If it’s
set to (“x”, “y”), the following patterns are all equivalent (and all bind the y attribute to the var variable):
Point(1, var)
Point(1, y=var)
Point(x=1, y=var)
Point(y=var, x=1)

A recommended way to read patterns is to look at them as an extended form of what you would put on the left of an assignment,
to understand which variables would be set to what. Only the standalone names (like var above) are assigned to by a match
statement. Dotted names (like foo.bar), attribute names (the x= and y= above) or class names (recognized by the “(…)” next to
them like Point above) are never assigned to.

Patterns can be arbitrarily nested. For example, if we have a short list of points, we could match it like this:
match points:
case []:
print("No points")
case [Point(0, 0)]:
print("The origin")
case [Point(x, y)]:
print(f"Single point {x}, {y}")
case [Point(0, y1), Point(0, y2)]:
print(f"Two on the Y axis at {y1}, {y2}")
case _:
print("Something else")

We can add an if clause to a pattern, known as a “guard”. If the guard is false, match goes on to try the next case block. Note
that value capture happens before the guard is evaluated:
match point:
case Point(x, y) if x == y:
print(f"Y=X at {x}")
case Point(x, y):
print(f"Not on the diagonal")

Several other key features of this statement:

• Like unpacking assignments, tuple and list patterns have exactly the same meaning and actually match arbitrary
sequences. An important exception is that they don’t match iterators or strings.

• Sequence patterns support extended unpacking: [x, y, *rest] and (x, y, *rest) work similar to unpacking
assignments. The name after * may also be _, so (x, y, *_) matches a sequence of at least two items without binding the
remaining items.

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• Mapping patterns: {"bandwidth": b, "latency": l} captures the "bandwidth" and "latency" values from a
dictionary. Unlike sequence patterns, extra keys are ignored. An unpacking like **rest is also supported. (But **_ would
be redundant, so it not allowed.)

• Subpatterns may be captured using the as keyword:

case (Point(x1, y1), Point(x2, y2) as p2): ...

will capture the second element of the input as p2 (as long as the input is a sequence of two points)

• Most literals are compared by equality, however the singletons True, False and None are compared by identity.

• Patterns may use named constants. These must be dotted names to prevent them from being interpreted as capture
variable:
from enum import Enum
class Color(Enum):
RED = 0
GREEN = 1
BLUE = 2

match color:
case Color.RED:
print("I see red!")
case Color.GREEN:
print("Grass is green")
case Color.BLUE:
print("I'm feeling the blues :(")

For a more detailed explanation and additional examples, you can look into PEP 636 which is written in a tutorial format.

4.7. Defining Functions

We can create a function that writes the Fibonacci series to an arbitrary boundary:
>>> def fib(n): # write Fibonacci series up to n
... """Print a Fibonacci series up to n."""
... a, b = 0, 1
... while a < n:
... print(a, end=' ')
... a, b = b, a+b
... print()
...
>>> # Now call the function we just defined:
... fib(2000)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597

The keyword def introduces a function definition. It must be followed by the function name and the parenthesized list of formal
parameters. The statements that form the body of the function start at the next line, and must be indented.

The first statement of the function body can optionally be a string literal; this string literal is the function’s documentation string,
or docstring. (More about docstrings can be found in the section Documentation Strings.) There are tools which use docstrings to
automatically produce online or printed documentation, or to let the user interactively browse through code; it’s good practice to
include docstrings in code that you write, so make a habit of it.

The execution of a function introduces a new symbol table used for the local variables of the function. More precisely, all
variable assignments in a function store the value in the local symbol table; whereas variable references first look in the local
symbol table, then in the local symbol tables of enclosing functions, then in the global symbol table, and finally in the table of
built-in names. Thus, global variables and variables of enclosing functions cannot be directly assigned a value within a function
(unless, for global variables, named in a global statement, or, for variables of enclosing functions, named in a nonlocal
statement), although they may be referenced.

The actual parameters (arguments) to a function call are introduced in the local symbol table of the called function when it is
called; thus, arguments are passed using call by value (where the value is always an object reference, not the value of the object).
[1] When a function calls another function, or calls itself recursively, a new local symbol table is created for that call.

A function definition associates the function name with the function object in the current symbol table. The interpreter
recognizes the object pointed to by that name as a user-defined function. Other names can also point to that same function object
and can also be used to access the function:
>>> fib
<function fib at 10042ed0>
>>> f = fib
>>> f(100)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89

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Coming from other languages, you might object that fib is not a function but a procedure since it doesn’t return a value. In fact,
even functions without a return statement do return a value, albeit a rather boring one. This value is called None (it’s a built-in
name). Writing the value None is normally suppressed by the interpreter if it would be the only value written. You can see it if
you really want to using print():
>>> fib(0)
>>> print(fib(0))
None

It is simple to write a function that returns a list of the numbers of the Fibonacci series, instead of printing it:
>>> def fib2(n): # return Fibonacci series up to n
... """Return a list containing the Fibonacci series up to n."""
... result = []
... a, b = 0, 1
... while a < n:
... result.append(a) # see below
... a, b = b, a+b
... return result
...
>>> f100 = fib2(100) # call it
>>> f100 # write the result
[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]

This example, as usual, demonstrates some new Python features:

• The return statement returns with a value from a function. return without an expression argument returns None. Falling
off the end of a function also returns None.
• The statement result.append(a) calls a method of the list object result. A method is a function that ‘belongs’ to an
object and is named obj.methodname, where obj is some object (this may be an expression), and methodname is the name
of a method that is defined by the object’s type. Different types define different methods. Methods of different types may
have the same name without causing ambiguity. (It is possible to define your own object types and methods, using classes,
see Classes) The method append() shown in the example is defined for list objects; it adds a new element at the end of the
list. In this example it is equivalent to result = result + [a], but more efficient.

4.8. More on Defining Functions

It is also possible to define functions with a variable number of arguments. There are three forms, which can be combined.

4.8.1. Default Argument Values

The most useful form is to specify a default value for one or more arguments. This creates a function that can be called with
fewer arguments than it is defined to allow. For example:
def ask_ok(prompt, retries=4, reminder='Please try again!'):
while True:
ok = input(prompt)
if ok in ('y', 'ye', 'yes'):
return True
if ok in ('n', 'no', 'nop', 'nope'):
return False
retries = retries - 1
if retries < 0:
raise ValueError('invalid user response')
print(reminder)

This function can be called in several ways:

• giving only the mandatory argument: ask_ok('Do you really want to quit?')
• giving one of the optional arguments: ask_ok('OK to overwrite the file?', 2)
• or even giving all arguments: ask_ok('OK to overwrite the file?', 2, 'Come on, only yes or no!')

This example also introduces the in keyword. This tests whether or not a sequence contains a certain value.

The default values are evaluated at the point of function definition in the defining scope, so that
i = 5

def f(arg=i):
print(arg)

i = 6
f()

will print 5.

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Important warning: The default value is evaluated only once. This makes a difference when the default is a mutable object
such as a list, dictionary, or instances of most classes. For example, the following function accumulates the arguments passed to
it on subsequent calls:
def f(a, L=[]):
L.append(a)
return L

print(f(1))
print(f(2))
print(f(3))

This will print

[1]
[1, 2]
[1, 2, 3]

If you don’t want the default to be shared between subsequent calls, you can write the function like this instead:
def f(a, L=None):
if L is None:
L = []
L.append(a)
return L

4.8.2. Keyword Arguments

Functions can also be called using keyword arguments of the form kwarg=value. For instance, the following function:
def parrot(voltage, state='a stiff', action='voom', type='Norwegian Blue'):
print("-- This parrot wouldn't", action, end=' ')
print("if you put", voltage, "volts through it.")
print("-- Lovely plumage, the", type)
print("-- It's", state, "!")

accepts one required argument (voltage) and three optional arguments (state, action, and type). This function can be called
in any of the following ways:
parrot(1000) # 1 positional argument
parrot(voltage=1000) # 1 keyword argument
parrot(voltage=1000000, action='VOOOOOM') # 2 keyword arguments
parrot(action='VOOOOOM', voltage=1000000) # 2 keyword arguments
parrot('a million', 'bereft of life', 'jump') # 3 positional arguments
parrot('a thousand', state='pushing up the daisies') # 1 positional, 1 keyword

but all the following calls would be invalid:

parrot() # required argument missing
parrot(voltage=5.0, 'dead') # non-keyword argument after a keyword argument
parrot(110, voltage=220) # duplicate value for the same argument
parrot(actor='John Cleese') # unknown keyword argument

In a function call, keyword arguments must follow positional arguments. All the keyword arguments passed must match one of
the arguments accepted by the function (e.g. actor is not a valid argument for the parrot function), and their order is not
important. This also includes non-optional arguments (e.g. parrot(voltage=1000) is valid too). No argument may receive a
value more than once. Here’s an example that fails due to this restriction:
>>> def function(a):
... pass
...
>>> function(0, a=0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: function() got multiple values for argument 'a'

When a final formal parameter of the form **name is present, it receives a dictionary (see Mapping Types — dict) containing all
keyword arguments except for those corresponding to a formal parameter. This may be combined with a formal parameter of the
form *name (described in the next subsection) which receives a tuple containing the positional arguments beyond the formal
parameter list. (*name must occur before **name.) For example, if we define a function like this:
def cheeseshop(kind, *arguments, **keywords):
print("-- Do you have any", kind, "?")
print("-- I'm sorry, we're all out of", kind)
for arg in arguments:
print(arg)
print("-" * 40)

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for kw in keywords:
print(kw, ":", keywords[kw])

It could be called like this:

cheeseshop("Limburger", "It's very runny, sir.",
"It's really very, VERY runny, sir.",
shopkeeper="Michael Palin",
client="John Cleese",
sketch="Cheese Shop Sketch")

and of course it would print:

-- Do you have any Limburger ?
-- I'm sorry, we're all out of Limburger
It's very runny, sir.
It's really very, VERY runny, sir.
----------------------------------------
shopkeeper : Michael Palin
client : John Cleese
sketch : Cheese Shop Sketch

Note that the order in which the keyword arguments are printed is guaranteed to match the order in which they were provided in
the function call.

4.8.3. Special parameters

By default, arguments may be passed to a Python function either by position or explicitly by keyword. For readability and
performance, it makes sense to restrict the way arguments can be passed so that a developer need only look at the function
definition to determine if items are passed by position, by position or keyword, or by keyword.

A function definition may look like:

def f(pos1, pos2, /, pos_or_kwd, *, kwd1, kwd2):
----------- ---------- ----------
| | |
| Positional or keyword |
| - Keyword only
-- Positional only

where / and * are optional. If used, these symbols indicate the kind of parameter by how the arguments may be passed to the
function: positional-only, positional-or-keyword, and keyword-only. Keyword parameters are also referred to as named
parameters.

4.8.3.1. Positional-or-Keyword Arguments

If / and * are not present in the function definition, arguments may be passed to a function by position or by keyword.

4.8.3.2. Positional-Only Parameters

Looking at this in a bit more detail, it is possible to mark certain parameters as positional-only. If positional-only, the
parameters’ order matters, and the parameters cannot be passed by keyword. Positional-only parameters are placed before a /
(forward-slash). The / is used to logically separate the positional-only parameters from the rest of the parameters. If there is no /
in the function definition, there are no positional-only parameters.

Parameters following the / may be positional-or-keyword or keyword-only.

4.8.3.3. Keyword-Only Arguments

To mark parameters as keyword-only, indicating the parameters must be passed by keyword argument, place an * in the
arguments list just before the first keyword-only parameter.

4.8.3.4. Function Examples

Consider the following example function definitions paying close attention to the markers / and *:
>>> def standard_arg(arg):
... print(arg)
...
>>> def pos_only_arg(arg, /):
... print(arg)
...
>>> def kwd_only_arg(*, arg):
... print(arg)

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...
>>> def combined_example(pos_only, /, standard, *, kwd_only):
... print(pos_only, standard, kwd_only)

The first function definition, standard_arg, the most familiar form, places no restrictions on the calling convention and
arguments may be passed by position or keyword:
>>> standard_arg(2)
2

>>> standard_arg(arg=2)
2

The second function pos_only_arg is restricted to only use positional parameters as there is a / in the function definition:
>>> pos_only_arg(1)
1

>>> pos_only_arg(arg=1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: pos_only_arg() got some positional-only arguments passed as keyword arguments: 'arg'

The third function kwd_only_args only allows keyword arguments as indicated by a * in the function definition:
>>> kwd_only_arg(3)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: kwd_only_arg() takes 0 positional arguments but 1 was given

>>> kwd_only_arg(arg=3)
3

And the last uses all three calling conventions in the same function definition:
>>> combined_example(1, 2, 3)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: combined_example() takes 2 positional arguments but 3 were given

>>> combined_example(1, 2, kwd_only=3)

1 2 3

>>> combined_example(1, standard=2, kwd_only=3)

1 2 3

>>> combined_example(pos_only=1, standard=2, kwd_only=3)

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: combined_example() got some positional-only arguments passed as keyword arguments: 'pos_only'

Finally, consider this function definition which has a potential collision between the positional argument name and **kwds
which has name as a key:
def foo(name, **kwds):
return 'name' in kwds

There is no possible call that will make it return True as the keyword 'name' will always bind to the first parameter. For
example:
>>> foo(1, **{'name': 2})
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: foo() got multiple values for argument 'name'
>>>

But using / (positional only arguments), it is possible since it allows name as a positional argument and 'name' as a key in the
keyword arguments:
def foo(name, /, **kwds):
return 'name' in kwds
>>> foo(1, **{'name': 2})
True

In other words, the names of positional-only parameters can be used in **kwds without ambiguity.

4.8.3.5. Recap

The use case will determine which parameters to use in the function definition:

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def f(pos1, pos2, /, pos_or_kwd, *, kwd1, kwd2):

As guidance:

• Use positional-only if you want the name of the parameters to not be available to the user. This is useful when parameter
names have no real meaning, if you want to enforce the order of the arguments when the function is called or if you need
to take some positional parameters and arbitrary keywords.
• Use keyword-only when names have meaning and the function definition is more understandable by being explicit with
names or you want to prevent users relying on the position of the argument being passed.
• For an API, use positional-only to prevent breaking API changes if the parameter’s name is modified in the future.

4.8.4. Arbitrary Argument Lists

Finally, the least frequently used option is to specify that a function can be called with an arbitrary number of arguments. These
arguments will be wrapped up in a tuple (see Tuples and Sequences). Before the variable number of arguments, zero or more
normal arguments may occur.
def write_multiple_items(file, separator, *args):
file.write(separator.join(args))

Normally, these variadic arguments will be last in the list of formal parameters, because they scoop up all remaining input
arguments that are passed to the function. Any formal parameters which occur after the *args parameter are ‘keyword-only’
arguments, meaning that they can only be used as keywords rather than positional arguments.
>>> def concat(*args, sep="/"):
... return sep.join(args)
...
>>> concat("earth", "mars", "venus")
'earth/mars/venus'
>>> concat("earth", "mars", "venus", sep=".")
'earth.mars.venus'

4.8.5. Unpacking Argument Lists

The reverse situation occurs when the arguments are already in a list or tuple but need to be unpacked for a function call
requiring separate positional arguments. For instance, the built-in range() function expects separate start and stop arguments. If
they are not available separately, write the function call with the *-operator to unpack the arguments out of a list or tuple:
>>> list(range(3, 6)) # normal call with separate arguments
[3, 4, 5]
>>> args = [3, 6]
>>> list(range(*args)) # call with arguments unpacked from a list
[3, 4, 5]

In the same fashion, dictionaries can deliver keyword arguments with the **-operator:
>>> def parrot(voltage, state='a stiff', action='voom'):
... print("-- This parrot wouldn't", action, end=' ')
... print("if you put", voltage, "volts through it.", end=' ')
... print("E's", state, "!")
...
>>> d = {"voltage": "four million", "state": "bleedin' demised", "action": "VOOM"}
>>> parrot(**d)
-- This parrot wouldn't VOOM if you put four million volts through it. E's bleedin' demised !

4.8.6. Lambda Expressions

Small anonymous functions can be created with the lambda keyword. This function returns the sum of its two arguments:
lambda a, b: a+b. Lambda functions can be used wherever function objects are required. They are syntactically restricted to a
single expression. Semantically, they are just syntactic sugar for a normal function definition. Like nested function definitions,
lambda functions can reference variables from the containing scope:
>>> def make_incrementor(n):
... return lambda x: x + n
...
>>> f = make_incrementor(42)
>>> f(0)
42
>>> f(1)
43

The above example uses a lambda expression to return a function. Another use is to pass a small function as an argument:
>>> pairs = [(1, 'one'), (2, 'two'), (3, 'three'), (4, 'four')]
>>> pairs.sort(key=lambda pair: pair[1])

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>>> pairs
[(4, 'four'), (1, 'one'), (3, 'three'), (2, 'two')]

4.8.7. Documentation Strings

Here are some conventions about the content and formatting of documentation strings.

The first line should always be a short, concise summary of the object’s purpose. For brevity, it should not explicitly state the
object’s name or type, since these are available by other means (except if the name happens to be a verb describing a function’s
operation). This line should begin with a capital letter and end with a period.

If there are more lines in the documentation string, the second line should be blank, visually separating the summary from the
rest of the description. The following lines should be one or more paragraphs describing the object’s calling conventions, its side
effects, etc.

The Python parser does not strip indentation from multi-line string literals in Python, so tools that process documentation have to
strip indentation if desired. This is done using the following convention. The first non-blank line after the first line of the string
determines the amount of indentation for the entire documentation string. (We can’t use the first line since it is generally
adjacent to the string’s opening quotes so its indentation is not apparent in the string literal.) Whitespace “equivalent” to this
indentation is then stripped from the start of all lines of the string. Lines that are indented less should not occur, but if they occur
all their leading whitespace should be stripped. Equivalence of whitespace should be tested after expansion of tabs (to 8 spaces,
normally).

Here is an example of a multi-line docstring:

>>> def my_function():
... """Do nothing, but document it.
...
... No, really, it doesn't do anything.
... """
... pass
...
>>> print(my_function.__doc__)
Do nothing, but document it.

No, really, it doesn't do anything.

4.8.8. Function Annotations

Function annotations are completely optional metadata information about the types used by user-defined functions (see PEP
3107 and PEP 484 for more information).

Annotations are stored in the __annotations__ attribute of the function as a dictionary and have no effect on any other part of
the function. Parameter annotations are defined by a colon after the parameter name, followed by an expression evaluating to the
value of the annotation. Return annotations are defined by a literal ->, followed by an expression, between the parameter list and
the colon denoting the end of the def statement. The following example has a required argument, an optional argument, and the
return value annotated:
>>> def f(ham: str, eggs: str = 'eggs') -> str:
... print("Annotations:", f.__annotations__)
... print("Arguments:", ham, eggs)
... return ham + ' and ' + eggs
...
>>> f('spam')
Annotations: {'ham': <class 'str'>, 'return': <class 'str'>, 'eggs': <class 'str'>}
Arguments: spam eggs
'spam and eggs'

4.9. Intermezzo: Coding Style

Now that you are about to write longer, more complex pieces of Python, it is a good time to talk about coding style. Most
languages can be written (or more concise, formatted) in different styles; some are more readable than others. Making it easy for
others to read your code is always a good idea, and adopting a nice coding style helps tremendously for that.

For Python, PEP 8 has emerged as the style guide that most projects adhere to; it promotes a very readable and eye-pleasing
coding style. Every Python developer should read it at some point; here are the most important points extracted for you:

• Use 4-space indentation, and no tabs.

4 spaces are a good compromise between small indentation (allows greater nesting depth) and large indentation (easier to
read). Tabs introduce confusion, and are best left out.

• Wrap lines so that they don’t exceed 79 characters.

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This helps users with small displays and makes it possible to have several code files side-by-side on larger displays.

• Use blank lines to separate functions and classes, and larger blocks of code inside functions.

• When possible, put comments on a line of their own.

• Use docstrings.

• Use spaces around operators and after commas, but not directly inside bracketing constructs: a = f(1, 2) + g(3, 4).

• Name your classes and functions consistently; the convention is to use UpperCamelCase for classes and
lowercase_with_underscores for functions and methods. Always use self as the name for the first method argument
(see A First Look at Classes for more on classes and methods).

• Don’t use fancy encodings if your code is meant to be used in international environments. Python’s default, UTF-8, or
even plain ASCII work best in any case.

• Likewise, don’t use non-ASCII characters in identifiers if there is only the slightest chance people speaking a different
language will read or maintain the code.

Footnotes

[1] Actually, call by object reference would be a better description, since if a mutable object is passed, the caller will see any
changes the callee makes to it (items inserted into a list).

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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
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Table of Contents

• 5. Data Structures
◦ 5.1. More on Lists
◾ 5.1.1. Using Lists as Stacks
◾ 5.1.2. Using Lists as Queues
◾ 5.1.3. List Comprehensions
◾ 5.1.4. Nested List Comprehensions
◦ 5.2. The del statement
◦ 5.3. Tuples and Sequences
◦ 5.4. Sets
◦ 5.5. Dictionaries
◦ 5.6. Looping Techniques
◦ 5.7. More on Conditions
◦ 5.8. Comparing Sequences and Other Types

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5. Data Structures
This chapter describes some things you’ve learned about already in more detail, and adds some new things as well.

5.1. More on Lists

The list data type has some more methods. Here are all of the methods of list objects:

list.append(x)

Add an item to the end of the list. Equivalent to a[len(a):] = [x].

list.extend(iterable)

Extend the list by appending all the items from the iterable. Equivalent to a[len(a):] = iterable.

list.insert(i, x)

Insert an item at a given position. The first argument is the index of the element before which to insert, so a.insert(0,
x) inserts at the front of the list, and a.insert(len(a), x) is equivalent to a.append(x).

list.remove(x)

Remove the first item from the list whose value is equal to x. It raises a ValueError if there is no such item.

list.pop([i])

Remove the item at the given position in the list, and return it. If no index is specified, a.pop() removes and returns the
last item in the list. (The square brackets around the i in the method signature denote that the parameter is optional, not
that you should type square brackets at that position. You will see this notation frequently in the Python Library
Reference.)

list.clear()

Remove all items from the list. Equivalent to del a[:].

list.index(x[, start[, end]])

Return zero-based index in the list of the first item whose value is equal to x. Raises a ValueError if there is no such item.

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The optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in the slice notation and are used to limit the search to a particular
subsequence of the list. The returned index is computed relative to the beginning of the full sequence rather than the start
argument.

list.count(x)

Return the number of times x appears in the list.

list.sort(*, key=None, reverse=False)

Sort the items of the list in place (the arguments can be used for sort customization, see sorted() for their explanation).

list.reverse()

Reverse the elements of the list in place.

list.copy()

Return a shallow copy of the list. Equivalent to a[:].

An example that uses most of the list methods:

>>> fruits = ['orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'banana', 'kiwi', 'apple', 'banana']
>>> fruits.count('apple')
2
>>> fruits.count('tangerine')
0
>>> fruits.index('banana')
3
>>> fruits.index('banana', 4) # Find next banana starting a position 4
6
>>> fruits.reverse()
>>> fruits
['banana', 'apple', 'kiwi', 'banana', 'pear', 'apple', 'orange']
>>> fruits.append('grape')
>>> fruits
['banana', 'apple', 'kiwi', 'banana', 'pear', 'apple', 'orange', 'grape']
>>> fruits.sort()
>>> fruits
['apple', 'apple', 'banana', 'banana', 'grape', 'kiwi', 'orange', 'pear']
>>> fruits.pop()
'pear'

You might have noticed that methods like insert, remove or sort that only modify the list have no return value printed – they
return the default None. [1] This is a design principle for all mutable data structures in Python.

Another thing you might notice is that not all data can be sorted or compared. For instance, [None, 'hello', 10] doesn’t sort
because integers can’t be compared to strings and None can’t be compared to other types. Also, there are some types that don’t
have a defined ordering relation. For example, 3+4j < 5+7j isn’t a valid comparison.

5.1.1. Using Lists as Stacks

The list methods make it very easy to use a list as a stack, where the last element added is the first element retrieved (“last-in,
first-out”). To add an item to the top of the stack, use append(). To retrieve an item from the top of the stack, use pop() without
an explicit index. For example:
>>> stack = [3, 4, 5]
>>> stack.append(6)
>>> stack.append(7)
>>> stack
[3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
>>> stack.pop()
7
>>> stack
[3, 4, 5, 6]
>>> stack.pop()
6
>>> stack.pop()
5
>>> stack
[3, 4]

5.1.2. Using Lists as Queues

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It is also possible to use a list as a queue, where the first element added is the first element retrieved (“first-in, first-out”);
however, lists are not efficient for this purpose. While appends and pops from the end of list are fast, doing inserts or pops from
the beginning of a list is slow (because all of the other elements have to be shifted by one).

To implement a queue, use collections.deque which was designed to have fast appends and pops from both ends. For
example:
>>> from collections import deque
>>> queue = deque(["Eric", "John", "Michael"])
>>> queue.append("Terry") # Terry arrives
>>> queue.append("Graham") # Graham arrives
>>> queue.popleft() # The first to arrive now leaves
'Eric'
>>> queue.popleft() # The second to arrive now leaves
'John'
>>> queue # Remaining queue in order of arrival
deque(['Michael', 'Terry', 'Graham'])

5.1.3. List Comprehensions

List comprehensions provide a concise way to create lists. Common applications are to make new lists where each element is the
result of some operations applied to each member of another sequence or iterable, or to create a subsequence of those elements
that satisfy a certain condition.

For example, assume we want to create a list of squares, like:

>>> squares = []
>>> for x in range(10):
... squares.append(x**2)
...
>>> squares
[0, 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81]

Note that this creates (or overwrites) a variable named x that still exists after the loop completes. We can calculate the list of
squares without any side effects using:
squares = list(map(lambda x: x**2, range(10)))

or, equivalently:
squares = [x**2 for x in range(10)]

which is more concise and readable.

A list comprehension consists of brackets containing an expression followed by a for clause, then zero or more for or if
clauses. The result will be a new list resulting from evaluating the expression in the context of the for and if clauses which
follow it. For example, this listcomp combines the elements of two lists if they are not equal:
>>> [(x, y) for x in [1,2,3] for y in [3,1,4] if x != y]
[(1, 3), (1, 4), (2, 3), (2, 1), (2, 4), (3, 1), (3, 4)]

and it’s equivalent to:

>>> combs = []
>>> for x in [1,2,3]:
... for y in [3,1,4]:
... if x != y:
... combs.append((x, y))
...
>>> combs
[(1, 3), (1, 4), (2, 3), (2, 1), (2, 4), (3, 1), (3, 4)]

Note how the order of the for and if statements is the same in both these snippets.

If the expression is a tuple (e.g. the (x, y) in the previous example), it must be parenthesized.
>>> vec = [-4, -2, 0, 2, 4]
>>> # create a new list with the values doubled
>>> [x*2 for x in vec]
[-8, -4, 0, 4, 8]
>>> # filter the list to exclude negative numbers
>>> [x for x in vec if x >= 0]
[0, 2, 4]
>>> # apply a function to all the elements
>>> [abs(x) for x in vec]
[4, 2, 0, 2, 4]
>>> # call a method on each element
>>> freshfruit = [' banana', ' loganberry ', 'passion fruit ']

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>>> [weapon.strip() for weapon in freshfruit]

['banana', 'loganberry', 'passion fruit']
>>> # create a list of 2-tuples like (number, square)
>>> [(x, x**2) for x in range(6)]
[(0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 4), (3, 9), (4, 16), (5, 25)]
>>> # the tuple must be parenthesized, otherwise an error is raised
>>> [x, x**2 for x in range(6)]
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
[x, x**2 for x in range(6)]
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>> # flatten a list using a listcomp with two 'for'
>>> vec = [[1,2,3], [4,5,6], [7,8,9]]
>>> [num for elem in vec for num in elem]
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]

List comprehensions can contain complex expressions and nested functions:

>>> from math import pi
>>> [str(round(pi, i)) for i in range(1, 6)]
['3.1', '3.14', '3.142', '3.1416', '3.14159']

5.1.4. Nested List Comprehensions

The initial expression in a list comprehension can be any arbitrary expression, including another list comprehension.

Consider the following example of a 3x4 matrix implemented as a list of 3 lists of length 4:
>>> matrix = [
... [1, 2, 3, 4],
... [5, 6, 7, 8],
... [9, 10, 11, 12],
... ]

The following list comprehension will transpose rows and columns:

>>> [[row[i] for row in matrix] for i in range(4)]
[[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7, 11], [4, 8, 12]]

As we saw in the previous section, the nested listcomp is evaluated in the context of the for that follows it, so this example is
equivalent to:
>>> transposed = []
>>> for i in range(4):
... transposed.append([row[i] for row in matrix])
...
>>> transposed
[[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7, 11], [4, 8, 12]]

which, in turn, is the same as:

>>> transposed = []
>>> for i in range(4):
... # the following 3 lines implement the nested listcomp
... transposed_row = []
... for row in matrix:
... transposed_row.append(row[i])
... transposed.append(transposed_row)
...
>>> transposed
[[1, 5, 9], [2, 6, 10], [3, 7, 11], [4, 8, 12]]

In the real world, you should prefer built-in functions to complex flow statements. The zip() function would do a great job for
this use case:
>>> list(zip(*matrix))
[(1, 5, 9), (2, 6, 10), (3, 7, 11), (4, 8, 12)]

See Unpacking Argument Lists for details on the asterisk in this line.

5.2. The del statement

There is a way to remove an item from a list given its index instead of its value: the del statement. This differs from the pop()
method which returns a value. The del statement can also be used to remove slices from a list or clear the entire list (which we
did earlier by assignment of an empty list to the slice). For example:
>>> a = [-1, 1, 66.25, 333, 333, 1234.5]
>>> del a[0]

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>>> a
[1, 66.25, 333, 333, 1234.5]
>>> del a[2:4]
>>> a
[1, 66.25, 1234.5]
>>> del a[:]
>>> a
[]

del can also be used to delete entire variables:

>>> del a

Referencing the name a hereafter is an error (at least until another value is assigned to it). We’ll find other uses for del later.

5.3. Tuples and Sequences

We saw that lists and strings have many common properties, such as indexing and slicing operations. They are two examples of
sequence data types (see Sequence Types — list, tuple, range). Since Python is an evolving language, other sequence data types
may be added. There is also another standard sequence data type: the tuple.

A tuple consists of a number of values separated by commas, for instance:

>>> t = 12345, 54321, 'hello!'
>>> t[0]
12345
>>> t
(12345, 54321, 'hello!')
>>> # Tuples may be nested:
... u = t, (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
>>> u
((12345, 54321, 'hello!'), (1, 2, 3, 4, 5))
>>> # Tuples are immutable:
... t[0] = 88888
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> # but they can contain mutable objects:
... v = ([1, 2, 3], [3, 2, 1])
>>> v
([1, 2, 3], [3, 2, 1])

As you see, on output tuples are always enclosed in parentheses, so that nested tuples are interpreted correctly; they may be input
with or without surrounding parentheses, although often parentheses are necessary anyway (if the tuple is part of a larger
expression). It is not possible to assign to the individual items of a tuple, however it is possible to create tuples which contain
mutable objects, such as lists.

Though tuples may seem similar to lists, they are often used in different situations and for different purposes. Tuples are
immutable, and usually contain a heterogeneous sequence of elements that are accessed via unpacking (see later in this section)
or indexing (or even by attribute in the case of namedtuples). Lists are mutable, and their elements are usually homogeneous
and are accessed by iterating over the list.

A special problem is the construction of tuples containing 0 or 1 items: the syntax has some extra quirks to accommodate these.
Empty tuples are constructed by an empty pair of parentheses; a tuple with one item is constructed by following a value with a
comma (it is not sufficient to enclose a single value in parentheses). Ugly, but effective. For example:
>>> empty = ()
>>> singleton = 'hello', # <-- note trailing comma
>>> len(empty)
0
>>> len(singleton)
1
>>> singleton
('hello',)

The statement t = 12345, 54321, 'hello!' is an example of tuple packing: the values 12345, 54321 and 'hello!' are
packed together in a tuple. The reverse operation is also possible:
>>> x, y, z = t

This is called, appropriately enough, sequence unpacking and works for any sequence on the right-hand side. Sequence
unpacking requires that there are as many variables on the left side of the equals sign as there are elements in the sequence. Note
that multiple assignment is really just a combination of tuple packing and sequence unpacking.

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5.4. Sets
Python also includes a data type for sets. A set is an unordered collection with no duplicate elements. Basic uses include
membership testing and eliminating duplicate entries. Set objects also support mathematical operations like union, intersection,
difference, and symmetric difference.

Curly braces or the set() function can be used to create sets. Note: to create an empty set you have to use set(), not {}; the
latter creates an empty dictionary, a data structure that we discuss in the next section.

Here is a brief demonstration:

>>> basket = {'apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana'}
>>> print(basket) # show that duplicates have been removed
{'orange', 'banana', 'pear', 'apple'}
>>> 'orange' in basket # fast membership testing
True
>>> 'crabgrass' in basket
False

>>> # Demonstrate set operations on unique letters from two words

...
>>> a = set('abracadabra')
>>> b = set('alacazam')
>>> a # unique letters in a
{'a', 'r', 'b', 'c', 'd'}
>>> a - b # letters in a but not in b
{'r', 'd', 'b'}
>>> a | b # letters in a or b or both
{'a', 'c', 'r', 'd', 'b', 'm', 'z', 'l'}
>>> a & b # letters in both a and b
{'a', 'c'}
>>> a ^ b # letters in a or b but not both
{'r', 'd', 'b', 'm', 'z', 'l'}

Similarly to list comprehensions, set comprehensions are also supported:

>>> a = {x for x in 'abracadabra' if x not in 'abc'}
>>> a
{'r', 'd'}

5.5. Dictionaries
Another useful data type built into Python is the dictionary (see Mapping Types — dict). Dictionaries are sometimes found in
other languages as “associative memories” or “associative arrays”. Unlike sequences, which are indexed by a range of numbers,
dictionaries are indexed by keys, which can be any immutable type; strings and numbers can always be keys. Tuples can be used
as keys if they contain only strings, numbers, or tuples; if a tuple contains any mutable object either directly or indirectly, it
cannot be used as a key. You can’t use lists as keys, since lists can be modified in place using index assignments, slice
assignments, or methods like append() and extend().

It is best to think of a dictionary as a set of key: value pairs, with the requirement that the keys are unique (within one
dictionary). A pair of braces creates an empty dictionary: {}. Placing a comma-separated list of key:value pairs within the braces
adds initial key:value pairs to the dictionary; this is also the way dictionaries are written on output.

The main operations on a dictionary are storing a value with some key and extracting the value given the key. It is also possible
to delete a key:value pair with del. If you store using a key that is already in use, the old value associated with that key is
forgotten. It is an error to extract a value using a non-existent key.

Performing list(d) on a dictionary returns a list of all the keys used in the dictionary, in insertion order (if you want it sorted,
just use sorted(d) instead). To check whether a single key is in the dictionary, use the in keyword.

Here is a small example using a dictionary:

>>> tel = {'jack': 4098, 'sape': 4139}
>>> tel['guido'] = 4127
>>> tel
{'jack': 4098, 'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127}
>>> tel['jack']
4098
>>> del tel['sape']
>>> tel['irv'] = 4127
>>> tel
{'jack': 4098, 'guido': 4127, 'irv': 4127}
>>> list(tel)
['jack', 'guido', 'irv']
>>> sorted(tel)
['guido', 'irv', 'jack']

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>>> 'guido' in tel

True
>>> 'jack' not in tel
False

The dict() constructor builds dictionaries directly from sequences of key-value pairs:
>>> dict([('sape', 4139), ('guido', 4127), ('jack', 4098)])
{'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127, 'jack': 4098}

In addition, dict comprehensions can be used to create dictionaries from arbitrary key and value expressions:
>>> {x: x**2 for x in (2, 4, 6)}
{2: 4, 4: 16, 6: 36}

When the keys are simple strings, it is sometimes easier to specify pairs using keyword arguments:
>>> dict(sape=4139, guido=4127, jack=4098)
{'sape': 4139, 'guido': 4127, 'jack': 4098}

5.6. Looping Techniques

When looping through dictionaries, the key and corresponding value can be retrieved at the same time using the items()
method.
>>> knights = {'gallahad': 'the pure', 'robin': 'the brave'}
>>> for k, v in knights.items():
... print(k, v)
...
gallahad the pure
robin the brave

When looping through a sequence, the position index and corresponding value can be retrieved at the same time using the
enumerate() function.

>>> for i, v in enumerate(['tic', 'tac', 'toe']):

... print(i, v)
...
0 tic
1 tac
2 toe

To loop over two or more sequences at the same time, the entries can be paired with the zip() function.
>>> questions = ['name', 'quest', 'favorite color']
>>> answers = ['lancelot', 'the holy grail', 'blue']
>>> for q, a in zip(questions, answers):
... print('What is your {0}? It is {1}.'.format(q, a))
...
What is your name? It is lancelot.
What is your quest? It is the holy grail.
What is your favorite color? It is blue.

To loop over a sequence in reverse, first specify the sequence in a forward direction and then call the reversed() function.
>>> for i in reversed(range(1, 10, 2)):
... print(i)
...
9
7
5
3
1

To loop over a sequence in sorted order, use the sorted() function which returns a new sorted list while leaving the source
unaltered.
>>> basket = ['apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> for i in sorted(basket):
... print(i)
...
apple
apple
banana
orange
orange
pear

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Using set() on a sequence eliminates duplicate elements. The use of sorted() in combination with set() over a sequence is
an idiomatic way to loop over unique elements of the sequence in sorted order.
>>> basket = ['apple', 'orange', 'apple', 'pear', 'orange', 'banana']
>>> for f in sorted(set(basket)):
... print(f)
...
apple
banana
orange
pear

It is sometimes tempting to change a list while you are looping over it; however, it is often simpler and safer to create a new list
instead.
>>> import math
>>> raw_data = [56.2, float('NaN'), 51.7, 55.3, 52.5, float('NaN'), 47.8]
>>> filtered_data = []
>>> for value in raw_data:
... if not math.isnan(value):
... filtered_data.append(value)
...
>>> filtered_data
[56.2, 51.7, 55.3, 52.5, 47.8]

5.7. More on Conditions

The conditions used in while and if statements can contain any operators, not just comparisons.

The comparison operators in and not in check whether a value occurs (does not occur) in a sequence. The operators is and is
not compare whether two objects are really the same object. All comparison operators have the same priority, which is lower
than that of all numerical operators.

Comparisons can be chained. For example, a < b == c tests whether a is less than b and moreover b equals c.

Comparisons may be combined using the Boolean operators and and or, and the outcome of a comparison (or of any other
Boolean expression) may be negated with not. These have lower priorities than comparison operators; between them, not has
the highest priority and or the lowest, so that A and not B or C is equivalent to (A and (not B)) or C. As always,
parentheses can be used to express the desired composition.

The Boolean operators and and or are so-called short-circuit operators: their arguments are evaluated from left to right, and
evaluation stops as soon as the outcome is determined. For example, if A and C are true but B is false, A and B and C does not
evaluate the expression C. When used as a general value and not as a Boolean, the return value of a short-circuit operator is the
last evaluated argument.

It is possible to assign the result of a comparison or other Boolean expression to a variable. For example,
>>> string1, string2, string3 = '', 'Trondheim', 'Hammer Dance'
>>> non_null = string1 or string2 or string3
>>> non_null
'Trondheim'

Note that in Python, unlike C, assignment inside expressions must be done explicitly with the walrus operator :=. This avoids a
common class of problems encountered in C programs: typing = in an expression when == was intended.

5.8. Comparing Sequences and Other Types

Sequence objects typically may be compared to other objects with the same sequence type. The comparison uses lexicographical
ordering: first the first two items are compared, and if they differ this determines the outcome of the comparison; if they are
equal, the next two items are compared, and so on, until either sequence is exhausted. If two items to be compared are
themselves sequences of the same type, the lexicographical comparison is carried out recursively. If all items of two sequences
compare equal, the sequences are considered equal. If one sequence is an initial sub-sequence of the other, the shorter sequence
is the smaller (lesser) one. Lexicographical ordering for strings uses the Unicode code point number to order individual
characters. Some examples of comparisons between sequences of the same type:
(1, 2, 3) < (1, 2, 4)
[1, 2, 3] < [1, 2, 4]
'ABC' < 'C' < 'Pascal' < 'Python'
(1, 2, 3, 4) < (1, 2, 4)
(1, 2) < (1, 2, -1)
(1, 2, 3) == (1.0, 2.0, 3.0)
(1, 2, ('aa', 'ab')) < (1, 2, ('abc', 'a'), 4)

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Note that comparing objects of different types with < or > is legal provided that the objects have appropriate comparison
methods. For example, mixed numeric types are compared according to their numeric value, so 0 equals 0.0, etc. Otherwise,
rather than providing an arbitrary ordering, the interpreter will raise a TypeError exception.

Footnotes

[1] Other languages may return the mutated object, which allows method chaining, such as d->insert("a")->remove("b")
->sort();.

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Table of Contents

• 6. Modules
◦ 6.1. More on Modules
◾ 6.1.1. Executing modules as scripts
◾ 6.1.2. The Module Search Path
◾ 6.1.3. “Compiled” Python files
◦ 6.2. Standard Modules
◦ 6.3. The dir() Function
◦ 6.4. Packages
◾ 6.4.1. Importing * From a Package
◾ 6.4.2. Intra-package References
◾ 6.4.3. Packages in Multiple Directories

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6. Modules
If you quit from the Python interpreter and enter it again, the definitions you have made (functions and variables) are lost.
Therefore, if you want to write a somewhat longer program, you are better off using a text editor to prepare the input for the
interpreter and running it with that file as input instead. This is known as creating a script. As your program gets longer, you
may want to split it into several files for easier maintenance. You may also want to use a handy function that you’ve written in
several programs without copying its definition into each program.

To support this, Python has a way to put definitions in a file and use them in a script or in an interactive instance of the
interpreter. Such a file is called a module; definitions from a module can be imported into other modules or into the main module
(the collection of variables that you have access to in a script executed at the top level and in calculator mode).

A module is a file containing Python definitions and statements. The file name is the module name with the suffix .py appended.
Within a module, the module’s name (as a string) is available as the value of the global variable __name__. For instance, use
your favorite text editor to create a file called fibo.py in the current directory with the following contents:
# Fibonacci numbers module

def fib(n): # write Fibonacci series up to n

a, b = 0, 1
while a < n:
print(a, end=' ')
a, b = b, a+b
print()

def fib2(n): # return Fibonacci series up to n

result = []
a, b = 0, 1
while a < n:
result.append(a)
a, b = b, a+b
return result

Now enter the Python interpreter and import this module with the following command:
>>> import fibo

This does not enter the names of the functions defined in fibo directly in the current symbol table; it only enters the module
name fibo there. Using the module name you can access the functions:
>>> fibo.fib(1000)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987
>>> fibo.fib2(100)
[0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89]
>>> fibo.__name__
'fibo'

If you intend to use a function often you can assign it to a local name:
>>> fib = fibo.fib
>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

6.1. More on Modules

A module can contain executable statements as well as function definitions. These statements are intended to initialize the
module. They are executed only the first time the module name is encountered in an import statement. [1] (They are also run if
the file is executed as a script.)

Each module has its own private symbol table, which is used as the global symbol table by all functions defined in the module.
Thus, the author of a module can use global variables in the module without worrying about accidental clashes with a user’s
global variables. On the other hand, if you know what you are doing you can touch a module’s global variables with the same
notation used to refer to its functions, modname.itemname.

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Modules can import other modules. It is customary but not required to place all import statements at the beginning of a module
(or script, for that matter). The imported module names are placed in the importing module’s global symbol table.

There is a variant of the import statement that imports names from a module directly into the importing module’s symbol table.
For example:
>>> from fibo import fib, fib2
>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

This does not introduce the module name from which the imports are taken in the local symbol table (so in the example, fibo is
not defined).

There is even a variant to import all names that a module defines:

>>> from fibo import *
>>> fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

This imports all names except those beginning with an underscore (_). In most cases Python programmers do not use this facility
since it introduces an unknown set of names into the interpreter, possibly hiding some things you have already defined.

Note that in general the practice of importing * from a module or package is frowned upon, since it often causes poorly readable
code. However, it is okay to use it to save typing in interactive sessions.

If the module name is followed by as, then the name following as is bound directly to the imported module.
>>> import fibo as fib
>>> fib.fib(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

This is effectively importing the module in the same way that import fibo will do, with the only difference of it being
available as fib.

It can also be used when utilising from with similar effects:

>>> from fibo import fib as fibonacci
>>> fibonacci(500)
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377

Note

For efficiency reasons, each module is only imported once per interpreter session. Therefore, if you change your modules, you
must restart the interpreter – or, if it’s just one module you want to test interactively, use importlib.reload(), e.g. import
importlib; importlib.reload(modulename).

6.1.1. Executing modules as scripts

When you run a Python module with

python fibo.py <arguments>

the code in the module will be executed, just as if you imported it, but with the __name__ set to "__main__". That means that by
adding this code at the end of your module:
if __name__ == "__main__":
import sys
fib(int(sys.argv[1]))

you can make the file usable as a script as well as an importable module, because the code that parses the command line only
runs if the module is executed as the “main” file:
$ python fibo.py 50
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34

If the module is imported, the code is not run:

>>> import fibo
>>>

This is often used either to provide a convenient user interface to a module, or for testing purposes (running the module as a
script executes a test suite).

6.1.2. The Module Search Path

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When a module named spam is imported, the interpreter first searches for a built-in module with that name. If not found, it then
searches for a file named spam.py in a list of directories given by the variable sys.path. sys.path is initialized from these
locations:

• The directory containing the input script (or the current directory when no file is specified).
• PYTHONPATH (a list of directory names, with the same syntax as the shell variable PATH).
• The installation-dependent default (by convention including a site-packages directory, handled by the site module).

Note

On file systems which support symlinks, the directory containing the input script is calculated after the symlink is followed. In
other words the directory containing the symlink is not added to the module search path.

After initialization, Python programs can modify sys.path. The directory containing the script being run is placed at the
beginning of the search path, ahead of the standard library path. This means that scripts in that directory will be loaded instead of
modules of the same name in the library directory. This is an error unless the replacement is intended. See section Standard
Modules for more information.

6.1.3. “Compiled” Python files

To speed up loading modules, Python caches the compiled version of each module in the __pycache__ directory under the name
module.version.pyc, where the version encodes the format of the compiled file; it generally contains the Python version
number. For example, in CPython release 3.3 the compiled version of spam.py would be cached as
__pycache__/spam.cpython-33.pyc. This naming convention allows compiled modules from different releases and different
versions of Python to coexist.

Python checks the modification date of the source against the compiled version to see if it’s out of date and needs to be
recompiled. This is a completely automatic process. Also, the compiled modules are platform-independent, so the same library
can be shared among systems with different architectures.

Python does not check the cache in two circumstances. First, it always recompiles and does not store the result for the module
that’s loaded directly from the command line. Second, it does not check the cache if there is no source module. To support a
non-source (compiled only) distribution, the compiled module must be in the source directory, and there must not be a source
module.

Some tips for experts:

• You can use the -O or -OO switches on the Python command to reduce the size of a compiled module. The -O switch
removes assert statements, the -OO switch removes both assert statements and __doc__ strings. Since some programs may
rely on having these available, you should only use this option if you know what you’re doing. “Optimized” modules have
an opt- tag and are usually smaller. Future releases may change the effects of optimization.
• A program doesn’t run any faster when it is read from a .pyc file than when it is read from a .py file; the only thing that’s
faster about .pyc files is the speed with which they are loaded.
• The module compileall can create .pyc files for all modules in a directory.
• There is more detail on this process, including a flow chart of the decisions, in PEP 3147.

6.2. Standard Modules

Python comes with a library of standard modules, described in a separate document, the Python Library Reference (“Library
Reference” hereafter). Some modules are built into the interpreter; these provide access to operations that are not part of the core
of the language but are nevertheless built in, either for efficiency or to provide access to operating system primitives such as
system calls. The set of such modules is a configuration option which also depends on the underlying platform. For example, the
winreg module is only provided on Windows systems. One particular module deserves some attention: sys, which is built into
every Python interpreter. The variables sys.ps1 and sys.ps2 define the strings used as primary and secondary prompts:
>>> import sys
>>> sys.ps1
'>>> '
>>> sys.ps2
'... '
>>> sys.ps1 = 'C> '
C> print('Yuck!')
Yuck!
C>

These two variables are only defined if the interpreter is in interactive mode.

The variable sys.path is a list of strings that determines the interpreter’s search path for modules. It is initialized to a default
path taken from the environment variable PYTHONPATH, or from a built-in default if PYTHONPATH is not set. You can modify it
using standard list operations:

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>>> import sys

>>> sys.path.append('/ufs/guido/lib/python')

6.3. The dir() Function

The built-in function dir() is used to find out which names a module defines. It returns a sorted list of strings:
>>> import fibo, sys
>>> dir(fibo)
['__name__', 'fib', 'fib2']
>>> dir(sys)
['__breakpointhook__', '__displayhook__', '__doc__', '__excepthook__',
'__interactivehook__', '__loader__', '__name__', '__package__', '__spec__',
'__stderr__', '__stdin__', '__stdout__', '__unraisablehook__',
'_clear_type_cache', '_current_frames', '_debugmallocstats', '_framework',
'_getframe', '_git', '_home', '_xoptions', 'abiflags', 'addaudithook',
'api_version', 'argv', 'audit', 'base_exec_prefix', 'base_prefix',
'breakpointhook', 'builtin_module_names', 'byteorder', 'call_tracing',
'callstats', 'copyright', 'displayhook', 'dont_write_bytecode', 'exc_info',
'excepthook', 'exec_prefix', 'executable', 'exit', 'flags', 'float_info',
'float_repr_style', 'get_asyncgen_hooks', 'get_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth',
'getallocatedblocks', 'getdefaultencoding', 'getdlopenflags',
'getfilesystemencodeerrors', 'getfilesystemencoding', 'getprofile',
'getrecursionlimit', 'getrefcount', 'getsizeof', 'getswitchinterval',
'gettrace', 'hash_info', 'hexversion', 'implementation', 'int_info',
'intern', 'is_finalizing', 'last_traceback', 'last_type', 'last_value',
'maxsize', 'maxunicode', 'meta_path', 'modules', 'path', 'path_hooks',
'path_importer_cache', 'platform', 'prefix', 'ps1', 'ps2', 'pycache_prefix',
'set_asyncgen_hooks', 'set_coroutine_origin_tracking_depth', 'setdlopenflags',
'setprofile', 'setrecursionlimit', 'setswitchinterval', 'settrace', 'stderr',
'stdin', 'stdout', 'thread_info', 'unraisablehook', 'version', 'version_info',
'warnoptions']

Without arguments, dir() lists the names you have defined currently:
>>> a = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
>>> import fibo
>>> fib = fibo.fib
>>> dir()
['__builtins__', '__name__', 'a', 'fib', 'fibo', 'sys']

Note that it lists all types of names: variables, modules, functions, etc.

dir() does not list the names of built-in functions and variables. If you want a list of those, they are defined in the standard
module builtins:
>>> import builtins
>>> dir(builtins)
['ArithmeticError', 'AssertionError', 'AttributeError', 'BaseException',
'BlockingIOError', 'BrokenPipeError', 'BufferError', 'BytesWarning',
'ChildProcessError', 'ConnectionAbortedError', 'ConnectionError',
'ConnectionRefusedError', 'ConnectionResetError', 'DeprecationWarning',
'EOFError', 'Ellipsis', 'EnvironmentError', 'Exception', 'False',
'FileExistsError', 'FileNotFoundError', 'FloatingPointError',
'FutureWarning', 'GeneratorExit', 'IOError', 'ImportError',
'ImportWarning', 'IndentationError', 'IndexError', 'InterruptedError',
'IsADirectoryError', 'KeyError', 'KeyboardInterrupt', 'LookupError',
'MemoryError', 'NameError', 'None', 'NotADirectoryError', 'NotImplemented',
'NotImplementedError', 'OSError', 'OverflowError',
'PendingDeprecationWarning', 'PermissionError', 'ProcessLookupError',
'ReferenceError', 'ResourceWarning', 'RuntimeError', 'RuntimeWarning',
'StopIteration', 'SyntaxError', 'SyntaxWarning', 'SystemError',
'SystemExit', 'TabError', 'TimeoutError', 'True', 'TypeError',
'UnboundLocalError', 'UnicodeDecodeError', 'UnicodeEncodeError',
'UnicodeError', 'UnicodeTranslateError', 'UnicodeWarning', 'UserWarning',
'ValueError', 'Warning', 'ZeroDivisionError', '_', '__build_class__',
'__debug__', '__doc__', '__import__', '__name__', '__package__', 'abs',
'all', 'any', 'ascii', 'bin', 'bool', 'bytearray', 'bytes', 'callable',
'chr', 'classmethod', 'compile', 'complex', 'copyright', 'credits',
'delattr', 'dict', 'dir', 'divmod', 'enumerate', 'eval', 'exec', 'exit',
'filter', 'float', 'format', 'frozenset', 'getattr', 'globals', 'hasattr',
'hash', 'help', 'hex', 'id', 'input', 'int', 'isinstance', 'issubclass',
'iter', 'len', 'license', 'list', 'locals', 'map', 'max', 'memoryview',
'min', 'next', 'object', 'oct', 'open', 'ord', 'pow', 'print', 'property',
'quit', 'range', 'repr', 'reversed', 'round', 'set', 'setattr', 'slice',
'sorted', 'staticmethod', 'str', 'sum', 'super', 'tuple', 'type', 'vars',
'zip']

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6.4. Packages
Packages are a way of structuring Python’s module namespace by using “dotted module names”. For example, the module name
A.B designates a submodule named B in a package named A. Just like the use of modules saves the authors of different modules
from having to worry about each other’s global variable names, the use of dotted module names saves the authors of multi-
module packages like NumPy or Pillow from having to worry about each other’s module names.

Suppose you want to design a collection of modules (a “package”) for the uniform handling of sound files and sound data. There
are many different sound file formats (usually recognized by their extension, for example: .wav, .aiff, .au), so you may need
to create and maintain a growing collection of modules for the conversion between the various file formats. There are also many
different operations you might want to perform on sound data (such as mixing, adding echo, applying an equalizer function,
creating an artificial stereo effect), so in addition you will be writing a never-ending stream of modules to perform these
operations. Here’s a possible structure for your package (expressed in terms of a hierarchical filesystem):
sound/ Top-level package
__init__.py Initialize the sound package
formats/ Subpackage for file format conversions
__init__.py
wavread.py
wavwrite.py
aiffread.py
aiffwrite.py
auread.py
auwrite.py
...
effects/ Subpackage for sound effects
__init__.py
echo.py
surround.py
reverse.py
...
filters/ Subpackage for filters
__init__.py
equalizer.py
vocoder.py
karaoke.py
...

When importing the package, Python searches through the directories on sys.path looking for the package subdirectory.

The __init__.py files are required to make Python treat directories containing the file as packages. This prevents directories
with a common name, such as string, unintentionally hiding valid modules that occur later on the module search path. In the
simplest case, __init__.py can just be an empty file, but it can also execute initialization code for the package or set the
__all__ variable, described later.

Users of the package can import individual modules from the package, for example:
import sound.effects.echo

This loads the submodule sound.effects.echo. It must be referenced with its full name.
sound.effects.echo.echofilter(input, output, delay=0.7, atten=4)

An alternative way of importing the submodule is:

from sound.effects import echo

This also loads the submodule echo, and makes it available without its package prefix, so it can be used as follows:
echo.echofilter(input, output, delay=0.7, atten=4)

Yet another variation is to import the desired function or variable directly:

from sound.effects.echo import echofilter

Again, this loads the submodule echo, but this makes its function echofilter() directly available:
echofilter(input, output, delay=0.7, atten=4)

Note that when using from package import item, the item can be either a submodule (or subpackage) of the package, or some
other name defined in the package, like a function, class or variable. The import statement first tests whether the item is defined
in the package; if not, it assumes it is a module and attempts to load it. If it fails to find it, an ImportError exception is raised.

Contrarily, when using syntax like import item.subitem.subsubitem, each item except for the last must be a package; the
last item can be a module or a package but can’t be a class or function or variable defined in the previous item.

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6.4.1. Importing * From a Package

Now what happens when the user writes from sound.effects import *? Ideally, one would hope that this somehow goes out
to the filesystem, finds which submodules are present in the package, and imports them all. This could take a long time and
importing sub-modules might have unwanted side-effects that should only happen when the sub-module is explicitly imported.

The only solution is for the package author to provide an explicit index of the package. The import statement uses the following
convention: if a package’s __init__.py code defines a list named __all__, it is taken to be the list of module names that
should be imported when from package import * is encountered. It is up to the package author to keep this list up-to-date
when a new version of the package is released. Package authors may also decide not to support it, if they don’t see a use for
importing * from their package. For example, the file sound/effects/__init__.py could contain the following code:
__all__ = ["echo", "surround", "reverse"]

This would mean that from sound.effects import * would import the three named submodules of the sound package.

If __all__ is not defined, the statement from sound.effects import * does not import all submodules from the package
sound.effects into the current namespace; it only ensures that the package sound.effects has been imported (possibly
running any initialization code in __init__.py) and then imports whatever names are defined in the package. This includes any
names defined (and submodules explicitly loaded) by __init__.py. It also includes any submodules of the package that were
explicitly loaded by previous import statements. Consider this code:
import sound.effects.echo
import sound.effects.surround
from sound.effects import *

In this example, the echo and surround modules are imported in the current namespace because they are defined in the
sound.effects package when the from...import statement is executed. (This also works when __all__ is defined.)

Although certain modules are designed to export only names that follow certain patterns when you use import *, it is still
considered bad practice in production code.

Remember, there is nothing wrong with using from package import specific_submodule! In fact, this is the recommended
notation unless the importing module needs to use submodules with the same name from different packages.

6.4.2. Intra-package References

When packages are structured into subpackages (as with the sound package in the example), you can use absolute imports to
refer to submodules of siblings packages. For example, if the module sound.filters.vocoder needs to use the echo module in
the sound.effects package, it can use from sound.effects import echo.

You can also write relative imports, with the from module import name form of import statement. These imports use leading
dots to indicate the current and parent packages involved in the relative import. From the surround module for example, you
might use:
from . import echo
from .. import formats
from ..filters import equalizer

Note that relative imports are based on the name of the current module. Since the name of the main module is always
"__main__", modules intended for use as the main module of a Python application must always use absolute imports.

6.4.3. Packages in Multiple Directories

Packages support one more special attribute, __path__. This is initialized to be a list containing the name of the directory
holding the package’s __init__.py before the code in that file is executed. This variable can be modified; doing so affects
future searches for modules and subpackages contained in the package.

While this feature is not often needed, it can be used to extend the set of modules found in a package.

Footnotes

[1] In fact function definitions are also ‘statements’ that are ‘executed’; the execution of a module-level function definition
enters the function name in the module’s global symbol table.

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This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
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Table of Contents

• 7. Input and Output

◦ 7.1. Fancier Output Formatting
◾ 7.1.1. Formatted String Literals
◾ 7.1.2. The String format() Method
◾ 7.1.3. Manual String Formatting
◾ 7.1.4. Old string formatting
◦ 7.2. Reading and Writing Files
◾ 7.2.1. Methods of File Objects
◾ 7.2.2. Saving structured data with json

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7. Input and Output

There are several ways to present the output of a program; data can be printed in a human-readable form, or written to a file for
future use. This chapter will discuss some of the possibilities.

7.1. Fancier Output Formatting

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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 several
ways to format output.

• To use formatted string literals, begin a string with f or F before the opening quotation mark or triple quotation mark.
Inside this string, you can write a Python expression between { and } characters that can refer to variables or literal values.
>>> year = 2016
>>> event = 'Referendum'
>>> f'Results of the {year} {event}'
'Results of the 2016 Referendum'

• The str.format() method of strings requires more manual effort. You’ll still use { and } to mark where a variable will
be substituted and can provide detailed formatting directives, but you’ll also need to provide the information to be
formatted.
>>> yes_votes = 42_572_654
>>> no_votes = 43_132_495
>>> percentage = yes_votes / (yes_votes + no_votes)
>>> '{:-9} YES votes {:2.2%}'.format(yes_votes, percentage)
' 42572654 YES votes 49.67%'

• Finally, you can do all the string handling yourself by using string slicing and concatenation operations to create any
layout you can imagine. The string type has some methods that perform useful operations for padding strings to a given
column width.

When you don’t need fancy output but just want a quick display of some variables for debugging purposes, you can convert any
value to a string with 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'))"

The string module contains a Template class that offers yet another way to substitute values into strings, using placeholders
like $x and replacing them with values from a dictionary, but offers much less control of the formatting.

7.1.1. Formatted String Literals

Formatted string literals (also called f-strings for short) let you include the value of Python expressions inside a string by
prefixing the string with f or F and writing expressions as {expression}.

An optional format specifier can follow the expression. This allows greater control over how the value is formatted. The
following example rounds pi to three places after the decimal:
>>> import math
>>> print(f'The value of pi is approximately {math.pi:.3f}.')
The value of pi is approximately 3.142.

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Passing an integer after the ':' will cause that field to be a minimum number of characters wide. This is useful for making
columns line up.
>>> table = {'Sjoerd': 4127, 'Jack': 4098, 'Dcab': 7678}
>>> for name, phone in table.items():
... print(f'{name:10} ==> {phone:10d}')
...
Sjoerd ==> 4127
Jack ==> 4098
Dcab ==> 7678

Other modifiers can be used to convert the value before it is formatted. '!a' applies ascii(), '!s' applies str(), and '!r'
applies repr():
>>> animals = 'eels'
>>> print(f'My hovercraft is full of {animals}.')
My hovercraft is full of eels.
>>> print(f'My hovercraft is full of {animals!r}.')
My hovercraft is full of 'eels'.

For a reference on these format specifications, see the reference guide for the Format Specification Mini-Language.

7.1.2. The String format() Method

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.

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.

As an example, the following lines produce a tidily-aligned set of columns giving integers and their squares and cubes:
>>> 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

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7 49 343
8 64 512
9 81 729
10 100 1000

For a complete overview of string formatting with str.format(), see Format String Syntax.

7.1.3. Manual String Formatting

Here’s the same table of squares and cubes, formatted manually:

>>> 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

(Note that the one space between each column was added by the way print() works: it always adds spaces between its
arguments.)

The str.rjust() method of string objects 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'

7.1.4. Old string formatting

The % operator (modulo) can also be used for string formatting. Given 'string' % values, instances of % in string are
replaced with zero or more elements of values. This operation is commonly known as string interpolation. 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.

7.2. Reading and Writing Files

open() returns a file object, and is most commonly used with two arguments: open(filename, mode).

>>> f = open('workfile', 'w')

The first argument is a string containing the filename. The second argument is another string containing a few characters
describing the way in which the file will be used. mode can be 'r' when the file will only be read, 'w' for only writing (an
existing file with the same name will be erased), and 'a' opens the file for appending; any data written to the file is
automatically added to the end. 'r+' opens the file for both reading and writing. The mode argument is optional; 'r' will be
assumed if it’s omitted.

Normally, files are opened in text mode, that means, you read and write strings from and to the file, which are encoded in a
specific encoding. If encoding is not specified, the default is platform dependent (see open()). 'b' appended to the mode opens
the file in binary mode: now the data is read and written in the form of bytes objects. This mode should be used for all files that
don’t contain text.

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In text mode, the default when reading is to convert platform-specific line endings (\n on Unix, \r\n on Windows) to just \n.
When writing in text mode, the default is to convert occurrences of \n back to platform-specific line endings. This behind-the-
scenes modification to file data is fine for text files, but will corrupt binary data like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be very careful to
use binary mode when reading and writing such files.

It is good practice to use the with keyword when dealing with file objects. The advantage is that the file is properly closed after
its suite finishes, even if an exception is raised at some point. Using with is also much shorter than writing equivalent
try-finally blocks:

>>> with open('workfile') as f:

... read_data = f.read()

>>> # We can check that the file has been automatically closed.
>>> f.closed
True

If you’re not using the with keyword, then you should call f.close() to close the file and immediately free up any system
resources used by it.

Warning

Calling f.write() without using the with keyword or calling f.close() might result in the arguments of f.write() not being
completely written to the disk, even if the program exits successfully.

After a file object is closed, either by a with statement or by calling f.close(), attempts to use the file object will automatically
fail.
>>> f.close()
>>> f.read()
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: I/O operation on closed file.

7.2.1. Methods of File Objects

The rest of the examples in this section will assume that a file object called f has already been created.

To read a file’s contents, call f.read(size), which reads some quantity of data and returns it as a string (in text mode) or bytes
object (in binary mode). size is an optional numeric argument. When size is omitted or negative, the entire contents of the file
will be read and returned; it’s your problem if the file is twice as large as your machine’s memory. Otherwise, at most size
characters (in text mode) or size bytes (in binary mode) are read and returned. If the end of the file has been reached, f.read()
will return an empty string ('').
>>> f.read()
'This is the entire file.\n'
>>> f.read()
''

f.readline() reads a single line from the file; a newline character (\n) is left at the end of the string, and is only omitted on the
last line of the file if the file doesn’t end in a newline. This makes the return value unambiguous; if f.readline() returns an
empty string, the end of the file has been reached, while a blank line is represented by '\n', a string containing only a single
newline.
>>> f.readline()
'This is the first line of the file.\n'
>>> f.readline()
'Second line of the file\n'
>>> f.readline()
''

For reading lines from a file, you can loop over the file object. This is memory efficient, fast, and leads to simple code:
>>> for line in f:
... print(line, end='')
...
This is the first line of the file.
Second line of the file

If you want to read all the lines of a file in a list you can also use list(f) or f.readlines().

f.write(string) writes the contents of string to the file, returning the number of characters written.

>>> f.write('This is a test\n')

15

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Other types of objects need to be converted – either to a string (in text mode) or a bytes object (in binary mode) – before writing
them:
>>> value = ('the answer', 42)
>>> s = str(value) # convert the tuple to string
>>> f.write(s)
18

f.tell() returns an integer giving the file object’s current position in the file represented as number of bytes from the
beginning of the file when in binary mode and an opaque number when in text mode.

To change the file object’s position, use f.seek(offset, whence). The position is computed from adding offset to a reference
point; the reference point is selected by the whence argument. A whence value of 0 measures from the beginning of the file, 1
uses the current file position, and 2 uses the end of the file as the reference point. whence can be omitted and defaults to 0, using
the beginning of the file as the reference point.
>>> f = open('workfile', 'rb+')
>>> f.write(b'0123456789abcdef')
16
>>> f.seek(5) # Go to the 6th byte in the file
5
>>> f.read(1)
b'5'
>>> f.seek(-3, 2) # Go to the 3rd byte before the end
13
>>> f.read(1)
b'd'

In text files (those opened without a b in the mode string), only seeks relative to the beginning of the file are allowed (the
exception being seeking to the very file end with seek(0, 2)) and the only valid offset values are those returned from the
f.tell(), or zero. Any other offset value produces undefined behaviour.

File objects have some additional methods, such as isatty() and truncate() which are less frequently used; consult the
Library Reference for a complete guide to file objects.

7.2.2. Saving structured data with json

Strings can easily be written to and read from a file. Numbers take a bit more effort, since the read() method only returns
strings, which will have to be passed to a function like int(), which takes a string like '123' and returns its numeric value 123.
When you want to save more complex data types like nested lists and dictionaries, parsing and serializing by hand becomes
complicated.

Rather than having users constantly writing and debugging code to save complicated data types to files, Python allows you to
use the popular data interchange format called JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). The standard module called json can take
Python data hierarchies, and convert them to string representations; this process is called serializing. Reconstructing the data
from the string representation is called deserializing. Between serializing and deserializing, the string representing the object
may have been stored in a file or data, or sent over a network connection to some distant machine.

Note

The JSON format is commonly used by modern applications to allow for data exchange. Many programmers are already familiar
with it, which makes it a good choice for interoperability.

If you have an object x, you can view its JSON string representation with a simple line of code:
>>> import json
>>> x = [1, 'simple', 'list']
>>> json.dumps(x)
'[1, "simple", "list"]'

Another variant of the dumps() function, called dump(), simply serializes the object to a text file. So if f is a text file object
opened for writing, we can do this:
json.dump(x, f)

To decode the object again, if f is a text file object which has been opened for reading:
x = json.load(f)

This simple serialization technique can handle lists and dictionaries, but serializing arbitrary class instances in JSON requires a
bit of extra effort. The reference for the json module contains an explanation of this.

See also

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pickle - the pickle module

Contrary to JSON, pickle is a protocol which allows the serialization of arbitrarily complex Python objects. As such, it is specific
to Python and cannot be used to communicate with applications written in other languages. It is also insecure by default:
deserializing pickle data coming from an untrusted source can execute arbitrary code, if the data was crafted by a skilled
attacker.

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This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
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Table of Contents

• 8. Errors and Exceptions

◦ 8.1. Syntax Errors
◦ 8.2. Exceptions
◦ 8.3. Handling Exceptions
◦ 8.4. Raising Exceptions
◦ 8.5. Exception Chaining
◦ 8.6. User-defined Exceptions
◦ 8.7. Defining Clean-up Actions
◦ 8.8. Predefined Clean-up Actions

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• 3.10.0 Documentation »
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8. Errors and Exceptions

Until now error messages haven’t been more than mentioned, but if you have tried out the examples you have probably seen
some. There are (at least) two distinguishable kinds of errors: syntax errors and exceptions.

8.1. Syntax Errors

Syntax errors, also known as parsing errors, are perhaps the most common kind of complaint you get while you are still learning
Python:
>>> while True print('Hello world')
File "<stdin>", line 1
while True print('Hello world')
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

The parser repeats the offending line and displays a little ‘arrow’ pointing at the earliest point in the line where the error was
detected. The error is caused by (or at least detected at) the token preceding the arrow: in the example, the error is detected at the
function print(), since a colon (':') is missing before it. File name and line number are printed so you know where to look in
case the input came from a script.

8.2. Exceptions
Even if a statement or expression is syntactically correct, it may cause an error when an attempt is made to execute it. Errors
detected during execution are called exceptions and are not unconditionally fatal: you will soon learn how to handle them in
Python programs. Most exceptions are not handled by programs, however, and result in error messages as shown here:
>>> 10 * (1/0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ZeroDivisionError: division by zero
>>> 4 + spam*3
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'spam' is not defined
>>> '2' + 2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str

The last line of the error message indicates what happened. Exceptions come in different types, and the type is printed as part of
the message: the types in the example are ZeroDivisionError, NameError and TypeError. The string printed as the exception
type is the name of the built-in exception that occurred. This is true for all built-in exceptions, but need not be true for user-
defined exceptions (although it is a useful convention). Standard exception names are built-in identifiers (not reserved
keywords).

The rest of the line provides detail based on the type of exception and what caused it.

The preceding part of the error message shows the context where the exception occurred, in the form of a stack traceback. In
general it contains a stack traceback listing source lines; however, it will not display lines read from standard input.

Built-in Exceptions lists the built-in exceptions and their meanings.

8.3. Handling Exceptions

It is possible to write programs that handle selected exceptions. Look at the following example, which asks the user for input
until a valid integer has been entered, but allows the user to interrupt the program (using Control-C or whatever the operating
system supports); note that a user-generated interruption is signalled by raising the KeyboardInterrupt exception.
>>> while True:
... try:
... x = int(input("Please enter a number: "))
... break
... except ValueError:
... print("Oops! That was no valid number. Try again...")
...

The try statement works as follows.

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• First, the try clause (the statement(s) between the try and except keywords) is executed.
• If no exception occurs, the except clause is skipped and execution of the try statement is finished.
• If an exception occurs during execution of the try clause, the rest of the clause is skipped. Then, if its type matches the
exception named after the except keyword, the except clause is executed, and then execution continues after the
try/except block.
• If an exception occurs which does not match the exception named in the except clause, it is passed on to outer try
statements; if no handler is found, it is an unhandled exception and execution stops with a message as shown above.

A try statement may have more than one except clause, to specify handlers for different exceptions. At most one handler will be
executed. Handlers only handle exceptions that occur in the corresponding try clause, not in other handlers of the same try
statement. An except clause may name multiple exceptions as a parenthesized tuple, for example:
... except (RuntimeError, TypeError, NameError):
... pass

A class in an except clause is compatible with an exception if it is the same class or a base class thereof (but not the other way
around — an except clause listing a derived class is not compatible with a base class). For example, the following code will print
B, C, D in that order:
class B(Exception):
pass

class C(B):
pass

class D(C):
pass

for cls in [B, C, D]:

try:
raise cls()
except D:
print("D")
except C:
print("C")
except B:
print("B")

Note that if the except clauses were reversed (with except B first), it would have printed B, B, B — the first matching except
clause is triggered.

All exceptions inherit from BaseException, and so it can be used to serve as a wildcard. Use this with extreme caution, since it
is easy to mask a real programming error in this way! It can also be used to print an error message and then re-raise the
exception (allowing a caller to handle the exception as well):
import sys

try:
f = open('myfile.txt')
s = f.readline()
i = int(s.strip())
except OSError as err:
print("OS error: {0}".format(err))
except ValueError:
print("Could not convert data to an integer.")
except BaseException as err:
print(f"Unexpected {err=}, {type(err)=}")
raise

Alternatively the last except clause may omit the exception name(s), however the exception value must then be retrieved from
sys.exc_info()[1].

The try … except statement has an optional else clause, which, when present, must follow all except clauses. It is useful for
code that must be executed if the try clause does not raise an exception. For example:
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
try:
f = open(arg, 'r')
except OSError:
print('cannot open', arg)
else:
print(arg, 'has', len(f.readlines()), 'lines')
f.close()

The use of the else clause is better than adding additional code to the try clause because it avoids accidentally catching an
exception that wasn’t raised by the code being protected by the try … except statement.

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When an exception occurs, it may have an associated value, also known as the exception’s argument. The presence and type of
the argument depend on the exception type.

The except clause may specify a variable after the exception name. The variable is bound to an exception instance with the
arguments stored in instance.args. For convenience, the exception instance defines __str__() so the arguments can be
printed directly without having to reference .args. One may also instantiate an exception first before raising it and add any
attributes to it as desired.
>>> try:
... raise Exception('spam', 'eggs')
... except Exception as inst:
... print(type(inst)) # the exception instance
... print(inst.args) # arguments stored in .args
... print(inst) # __str__ allows args to be printed directly,
... # but may be overridden in exception subclasses
... x, y = inst.args # unpack args
... print('x =', x)
... print('y =', y)
...
<class 'Exception'>
('spam', 'eggs')
('spam', 'eggs')
x = spam
y = eggs

If an exception has arguments, they are printed as the last part (‘detail’) of the message for unhandled exceptions.

Exception handlers don’t just handle exceptions if they occur immediately in the try clause, but also if they occur inside
functions that are called (even indirectly) in the try clause. For example:
>>> def this_fails():
... x = 1/0
...
>>> try:
... this_fails()
... except ZeroDivisionError as err:
... print('Handling run-time error:', err)
...
Handling run-time error: division by zero

8.4. Raising Exceptions

The raise statement allows the programmer to force a specified exception to occur. For example:
>>> raise NameError('HiThere')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: HiThere

The sole argument to raise indicates the exception to be raised. This must be either an exception instance or an exception class
(a class that derives from Exception). If an exception class is passed, it will be implicitly instantiated by calling its constructor
with no arguments:
raise ValueError # shorthand for 'raise ValueError()'

If you need to determine whether an exception was raised but don’t intend to handle it, a simpler form of the raise statement
allows you to re-raise the exception:
>>> try:
... raise NameError('HiThere')
... except NameError:
... print('An exception flew by!')
... raise
...
An exception flew by!
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
NameError: HiThere

8.5. Exception Chaining

The raise statement allows an optional from which enables chaining exceptions. For example:
# exc must be exception instance or None.
raise RuntimeError from exc

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This can be useful when you are transforming exceptions. For example:
>>> def func():
... raise ConnectionError
...
>>> try:
... func()
... except ConnectionError as exc:
... raise RuntimeError('Failed to open database') from exc
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 2, in func
ConnectionError

The above exception was the direct cause of the following exception:

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "<stdin>", line 4, in <module>
RuntimeError: Failed to open database

Exception chaining happens automatically when an exception is raised inside an except or finally section. This can be
disabled by using from None idiom:
>>> try:
... open('database.sqlite')
... except OSError:
... raise RuntimeError from None
...
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 4, in <module>
RuntimeError

For more information about chaining mechanics, see Built-in Exceptions.

8.6. User-defined Exceptions

Programs may name their own exceptions by creating a new exception class (see Classes for more about Python classes).
Exceptions should typically be derived from the Exception class, either directly or indirectly.

Exception classes can be defined which do anything any other class can do, but are usually kept simple, often only offering a
number of attributes that allow information about the error to be extracted by handlers for the exception. When creating a
module that can raise several distinct errors, a common practice is to create a base class for exceptions defined by that module,
and subclass that to create specific exception classes for different error conditions:
class Error(Exception):
"""Base class for exceptions in this module."""
pass

class InputError(Error):
"""Exception raised for errors in the input.

Attributes:
expression -- input expression in which the error occurred
message -- explanation of the error
"""

def __init__(self, expression, message):

self.expression = expression
self.message = message

class TransitionError(Error):
"""Raised when an operation attempts a state transition that's not
allowed.

Attributes:
previous -- state at beginning of transition
next -- attempted new state
message -- explanation of why the specific transition is not allowed
"""

def __init__(self, previous, next, message):

self.previous = previous
self.next = next
self.message = message

Most exceptions are defined with names that end in “Error”, similar to the naming of the standard exceptions.

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Many standard modules define their own exceptions to report errors that may occur in functions they define. More information
on classes is presented in chapter Classes.

8.7. Defining Clean-up Actions

The try statement has another optional clause which is intended to define clean-up actions that must be executed under all
circumstances. For example:
>>> try:
... raise KeyboardInterrupt
... finally:
... print('Goodbye, world!')
...
Goodbye, world!
KeyboardInterrupt
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 2, in <module>

If a finally clause is present, the finally clause will execute as the last task before the try statement completes. The finally
clause runs whether or not the try statement produces an exception. The following points discuss more complex cases when an
exception occurs:

• If an exception occurs during execution of the try clause, the exception may be handled by an except clause. If the
exception is not handled by an except clause, the exception is re-raised after the finally clause has been executed.
• An exception could occur during execution of an except or else clause. Again, the exception is re-raised after the
finally clause has been executed.
• If the finally clause executes a break, continue or return statement, exceptions are not re-raised.
• If the try statement reaches a break, continue or return statement, the finally clause will execute just prior to the
break, continue or return statement’s execution.
• If a finally clause includes a return statement, the returned value will be the one from the finally clause’s return
statement, not the value from the try clause’s return statement.

For example:
>>> def bool_return():
... try:
... return True
... finally:
... return False
...
>>> bool_return()
False

A more complicated example:

>>> def divide(x, y):
... try:
... result = x / y
... except ZeroDivisionError:
... print("division by zero!")
... else:
... print("result is", result)
... finally:
... print("executing finally clause")
...
>>> divide(2, 1)
result is 2.0
executing finally clause
>>> divide(2, 0)
division by zero!
executing finally clause
>>> divide("2", "1")
executing finally clause
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "<stdin>", line 3, in divide
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for /: 'str' and 'str'

As you can see, the finally clause is executed in any event. The TypeError raised by dividing two strings is not handled by the
except clause and therefore re-raised after the finally clause has been executed.

In real world applications, the finally clause is useful for releasing external resources (such as files or network connections),
regardless of whether the use of the resource was successful.

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8.8. Predefined Clean-up Actions

Some objects define standard clean-up actions to be undertaken when the object is no longer needed, regardless of whether or
not the operation using the object succeeded or failed. Look at the following example, which tries to open a file and print its
contents to the screen.
for line in open("myfile.txt"):
print(line, end="")

The problem with this code is that it leaves the file open for an indeterminate amount of time after this part of the code has
finished executing. This is not an issue in simple scripts, but can be a problem for larger applications. The with statement allows
objects like files to be used in a way that ensures they are always cleaned up promptly and correctly.
with open("myfile.txt") as f:
for line in f:
print(line, end="")

After the statement is executed, the file f is always closed, even if a problem was encountered while processing the lines. Objects
which, like files, provide predefined clean-up actions will indicate this in their documentation.

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• Python »
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© Copyright 2001-2021, Python Software Foundation.

This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
Examples, recipes, and other code in the documentation are additionally licensed under the Zero Clause BSD License.
See History and License for more information.

The Python Software Foundation is a non-profit corporation. Please donate.

Last updated on Oct 04, 2021. Found a bug?

Created using Sphinx 2.2.0.

Go

Table of Contents

• 9. Classes
◦ 9.1. A Word About Names and Objects
◦ 9.2. Python Scopes and Namespaces
◾ 9.2.1. Scopes and Namespaces Example
◦ 9.3. A First Look at Classes
◾ 9.3.1. Class Definition Syntax
◾ 9.3.2. Class Objects
◾ 9.3.3. Instance Objects
◾ 9.3.4. Method Objects
◾ 9.3.5. Class and Instance Variables
◦ 9.4. Random Remarks
◦ 9.5. Inheritance
◾ 9.5.1. Multiple Inheritance
◦ 9.6. Private Variables
◦ 9.7. Odds and Ends
◦ 9.8. Iterators
◦ 9.9. Generators
◦ 9.10. Generator Expressions

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10. Brief Tour of the Standard Library

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9. Classes
Classes provide a means of bundling data and functionality together. Creating a new class creates a new type of object, allowing
new instances of that type to be made. Each class instance can have attributes attached to it for maintaining its state. Class
instances can also have methods (defined by its class) for modifying its state.

Compared with other programming languages, Python’s class mechanism adds classes with a minimum of new syntax and
semantics. It is a mixture of the class mechanisms found in C++ and Modula-3. Python classes provide all the standard features
of Object Oriented Programming: the class inheritance mechanism allows multiple base classes, a derived class can override any
methods of its base class or classes, and a method can call the method of a base class with the same name. Objects can contain
arbitrary amounts and kinds of data. As is true for modules, classes partake of the dynamic nature of Python: they are created at
runtime, and can be modified further after creation.

In C++ terminology, normally class members (including the data members) are public (except see below Private Variables), and
all member functions are virtual. As in Modula-3, there are no shorthands for referencing the object’s members from its
methods: the method function is declared with an explicit first argument representing the object, which is provided implicitly by
the call. As in Smalltalk, classes themselves are objects. This provides semantics for importing and renaming. Unlike C++ and
Modula-3, built-in types can be used as base classes for extension by the user. Also, like in C++, most built-in operators with
special syntax (arithmetic operators, subscripting etc.) can be redefined for class instances.

(Lacking universally accepted terminology to talk about classes, I will make occasional use of Smalltalk and C++ terms. I would
use Modula-3 terms, since its object-oriented semantics are closer to those of Python than C++, but I expect that few readers
have heard of it.)

9.1. A Word About Names and Objects

Objects have individuality, and multiple names (in multiple scopes) can be bound to the same object. This is known as aliasing
in other languages. This is usually not appreciated on a first glance at Python, and can be safely ignored when dealing with
immutable basic types (numbers, strings, tuples). However, aliasing has a possibly surprising effect on the semantics of Python
code involving mutable objects such as lists, dictionaries, and most other types. This is usually used to the benefit of the
program, since aliases behave like pointers in some respects. For example, passing an object is cheap since only a pointer is
passed by the implementation; and if a function modifies an object passed as an argument, the caller will see the change — this
eliminates the need for two different argument passing mechanisms as in Pascal.

9.2. Python Scopes and Namespaces

Before introducing classes, I first have to tell you something about Python’s scope rules. Class definitions play some neat tricks
with namespaces, and you need to know how scopes and namespaces work to fully understand what’s going on. Incidentally,
knowledge about this subject is useful for any advanced Python programmer.

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Let’s begin with some definitions.

A namespace is a mapping from names to objects. Most namespaces are currently implemented as Python dictionaries, but that’s
normally not noticeable in any way (except for performance), and it may change in the future. Examples of namespaces are: the
set of built-in names (containing functions such as abs(), and built-in exception names); the global names in a module; and the
local names in a function invocation. In a sense the set of attributes of an object also form a namespace. The important thing to
know about namespaces is that there is absolutely no relation between names in different namespaces; for instance, two different
modules may both define a function maximize without confusion — users of the modules must prefix it with the module name.

By the way, I use the word attribute for any name following a dot — for example, in the expression z.real, real is an attribute
of the object z. Strictly speaking, references to names in modules are attribute references: in the expression modname.funcname,
modname is a module object and funcname is an attribute of it. In this case there happens to be a straightforward mapping
between the module’s attributes and the global names defined in the module: they share the same namespace! [1]

Attributes may be read-only or writable. In the latter case, assignment to attributes is possible. Module attributes are writable:
you can write modname.the_answer = 42. Writable attributes may also be deleted with the del statement. For example, del
modname.the_answer will remove the attribute the_answer from the object named by modname.

Namespaces are created at different moments and have different lifetimes. The namespace containing the built-in names is
created when the Python interpreter starts up, and is never deleted. The global namespace for a module is created when the
module definition is read in; normally, module namespaces also last until the interpreter quits. The statements executed by the
top-level invocation of the interpreter, either read from a script file or interactively, are considered part of a module called
__main__, so they have their own global namespace. (The built-in names actually also live in a module; this is called builtins.)

The local namespace for a function is created when the function is called, and deleted when the function returns or raises an
exception that is not handled within the function. (Actually, forgetting would be a better way to describe what actually happens.)
Of course, recursive invocations each have their own local namespace.

A scope is a textual region of a Python program where a namespace is directly accessible. “Directly accessible” here means that
an unqualified reference to a name attempts to find the name in the namespace.

Although scopes are determined statically, they are used dynamically. At any time during execution, there are 3 or 4 nested
scopes whose namespaces are directly accessible:

• the innermost scope, which is searched first, contains the local names
• the scopes of any enclosing functions, which are searched starting with the nearest enclosing scope, contains non-local,
but also non-global names
• the next-to-last scope contains the current module’s global names
• the outermost scope (searched last) is the namespace containing built-in names

If a name is declared global, then all references and assignments go directly to the middle scope containing the module’s global
names. To rebind variables found outside of the innermost scope, the nonlocal statement can be used; if not declared nonlocal,
those variables are read-only (an attempt to write to such a variable will simply create a new local variable in the innermost
scope, leaving the identically named outer variable unchanged).

Usually, the local scope references the local names of the (textually) current function. Outside functions, the local scope
references the same namespace as the global scope: the module’s namespace. Class definitions place yet another namespace in
the local scope.

It is important to realize that scopes are determined textually: the global scope of a function defined in a module is that module’s
namespace, no matter from where or by what alias the function is called. On the other hand, the actual search for names is done
dynamically, at run time — however, the language definition is evolving towards static name resolution, at “compile” time, so
don’t rely on dynamic name resolution! (In fact, local variables are already determined statically.)

A special quirk of Python is that – if no global or nonlocal statement is in effect – assignments to names always go into the
innermost scope. Assignments do not copy data — they just bind names to objects. The same is true for deletions: the statement
del x removes the binding of x from the namespace referenced by the local scope. In fact, all operations that introduce new
names use the local scope: in particular, import statements and function definitions bind the module or function name in the
local scope.

The global statement can be used to indicate that particular variables live in the global scope and should be rebound there; the
nonlocal statement indicates that particular variables live in an enclosing scope and should be rebound there.

9.2.1. Scopes and Namespaces Example

This is an example demonstrating how to reference the different scopes and namespaces, and how global and nonlocal affect
variable binding:
def scope_test():
def do_local():
spam = "local spam"

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def do_nonlocal():
nonlocal spam
spam = "nonlocal spam"

def do_global():
global spam
spam = "global spam"

spam = "test spam"

do_local()
print("After local assignment:", spam)
do_nonlocal()
print("After nonlocal assignment:", spam)
do_global()
print("After global assignment:", spam)

scope_test()
print("In global scope:", spam)

The output of the example code is:

After local assignment: test spam
After nonlocal assignment: nonlocal spam
After global assignment: nonlocal spam
In global scope: global spam

Note how the local assignment (which is default) didn’t change scope_test’s binding of spam. The nonlocal assignment
changed scope_test’s binding of spam, and the global assignment changed the module-level binding.

You can also see that there was no previous binding for spam before the global assignment.

9.3. A First Look at Classes

Classes introduce a little bit of new syntax, three new object types, and some new semantics.

9.3.1. Class Definition Syntax

The simplest form of class definition looks like this:

class ClassName:
<statement-1>
.
.
.
<statement-N>

Class definitions, like function definitions (def statements) must be executed before they have any effect. (You could
conceivably place a class definition in a branch of an if statement, or inside a function.)

In practice, the statements inside a class definition will usually be function definitions, but other statements are allowed, and
sometimes useful — we’ll come back to this later. The function definitions inside a class normally have a peculiar form of
argument list, dictated by the calling conventions for methods — again, this is explained later.

When a class definition is entered, a new namespace is created, and used as the local scope — thus, all assignments to local
variables go into this new namespace. In particular, function definitions bind the name of the new function here.

When a class definition is left normally (via the end), a class object is created. This is basically a wrapper around the contents of
the namespace created by the class definition; we’ll learn more about class objects in the next section. The original local scope
(the one in effect just before the class definition was entered) is reinstated, and the class object is bound here to the class name
given in the class definition header (ClassName in the example).

9.3.2. Class Objects

Class objects support two kinds of operations: attribute references and instantiation.

Attribute references use the standard syntax used for all attribute references in Python: obj.name. Valid attribute names are all
the names that were in the class’s namespace when the class object was created. So, if the class definition looked like this:
class MyClass:
"""A simple example class"""
i = 12345

def f(self):
return 'hello world'

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then MyClass.i and MyClass.f are valid attribute references, returning an integer and a function object, respectively. Class
attributes can also be assigned to, so you can change the value of MyClass.i by assignment. __doc__ is also a valid attribute,
returning the docstring belonging to the class: "A simple example class".

Class instantiation uses function notation. Just pretend that the class object is a parameterless function that returns a new
instance of the class. For example (assuming the above class):
x = MyClass()

creates a new instance of the class and assigns this object to the local variable x.

The instantiation operation (“calling” a class object) creates an empty object. Many classes like to create objects with instances
customized to a specific initial state. Therefore a class may define a special method named __init__(), like this:
def __init__(self):
self.data = []

When a class defines an __init__() method, class instantiation automatically invokes __init__() for the newly-created class
instance. So in this example, a new, initialized instance can be obtained by:
x = MyClass()

Of course, the __init__() method may have arguments for greater flexibility. In that case, arguments given to the class
instantiation operator are passed on to __init__(). For example,
>>> class Complex:
... def __init__(self, realpart, imagpart):
... self.r = realpart
... self.i = imagpart
...
>>> x = Complex(3.0, -4.5)
>>> x.r, x.i
(3.0, -4.5)

9.3.3. Instance Objects

Now what can we do with instance objects? The only operations understood by instance objects are attribute references. There
are two kinds of valid attribute names: data attributes and methods.

data attributes correspond to “instance variables” in Smalltalk, and to “data members” in C++. Data attributes need not be
declared; like local variables, they spring into existence when they are first assigned to. For example, if x is the instance of
MyClass created above, the following piece of code will print the value 16, without leaving a trace:

x.counter = 1
while x.counter < 10:
x.counter = x.counter * 2
print(x.counter)
del x.counter

The other kind of instance attribute reference is a method. A method is a function that “belongs to” an object. (In Python, the
term method is not unique to class instances: other object types can have methods as well. For example, list objects have
methods called append, insert, remove, sort, and so on. However, in the following discussion, we’ll use the term method
exclusively to mean methods of class instance objects, unless explicitly stated otherwise.)

Valid method names of an instance object depend on its class. By definition, all attributes of a class that are function objects
define corresponding methods of its instances. So in our example, x.f is a valid method reference, since MyClass.f is a
function, but x.i is not, since MyClass.i is not. But x.f is not the same thing as MyClass.f — it is a method object, not a
function object.

9.3.4. Method Objects

Usually, a method is called right after it is bound:

x.f()

In the MyClass example, this will return the string 'hello world'. However, it is not necessary to call a method right away:
x.f is a method object, and can be stored away and called at a later time. For example:

xf = x.f
while True:
print(xf())

will continue to print hello world until the end of time.

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What exactly happens when a method is called? You may have noticed that x.f() was called without an argument above, even
though the function definition for f() specified an argument. What happened to the argument? Surely Python raises an
exception when a function that requires an argument is called without any — even if the argument isn’t actually used…

Actually, you may have guessed the answer: the special thing about methods is that the instance object is passed as the first
argument of the function. In our example, the call x.f() is exactly equivalent to MyClass.f(x). In general, calling a method
with a list of n arguments is equivalent to calling the corresponding function with an argument list that is created by inserting the
method’s instance object before the first argument.

If you still don’t understand how methods work, a look at the implementation can perhaps clarify matters. When a non-data
attribute of an instance is referenced, the instance’s class is searched. If the name denotes a valid class attribute that is a function
object, a method object is created by packing (pointers to) the instance object and the function object just found together in an
abstract object: this is the method object. When the method object is called with an argument list, a new argument list is
constructed from the instance object and the argument list, and the function object is called with this new argument list.

9.3.5. Class and Instance Variables

Generally speaking, instance variables are for data unique to each instance and class variables are for attributes and methods
shared by all instances of the class:
class Dog:

kind = 'canine' # class variable shared by all instances

def __init__(self, name):

self.name = name # instance variable unique to each instance

>>> d = Dog('Fido')
>>> e = Dog('Buddy')
>>> d.kind # shared by all dogs
'canine'
>>> e.kind # shared by all dogs
'canine'
>>> d.name # unique to d
'Fido'
>>> e.name # unique to e
'Buddy'

As discussed in A Word About Names and Objects, shared data can have possibly surprising effects with involving mutable
objects such as lists and dictionaries. For example, the tricks list in the following code should not be used as a class variable
because just a single list would be shared by all Dog instances:
class Dog:

tricks = [] # mistaken use of a class variable

def __init__(self, name):

self.name = name

def add_trick(self, trick):

self.tricks.append(trick)

>>> d = Dog('Fido')
>>> e = Dog('Buddy')
>>> d.add_trick('roll over')
>>> e.add_trick('play dead')
>>> d.tricks # unexpectedly shared by all dogs
['roll over', 'play dead']

Correct design of the class should use an instance variable instead:

class Dog:

def __init__(self, name):

self.name = name
self.tricks = [] # creates a new empty list for each dog

def add_trick(self, trick):

self.tricks.append(trick)

>>> d = Dog('Fido')
>>> e = Dog('Buddy')
>>> d.add_trick('roll over')
>>> e.add_trick('play dead')
>>> d.tricks
['roll over']
>>> e.tricks
['play dead']

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9.4. Random Remarks

If the same attribute name occurs in both an instance and in a class, then attribute lookup prioritizes the instance:
>>> class Warehouse:
purpose = 'storage'
region = 'west'

>>> w1 = Warehouse()
>>> print(w1.purpose, w1.region)
storage west
>>> w2 = Warehouse()
>>> w2.region = 'east'
>>> print(w2.purpose, w2.region)
storage east

Data attributes may be referenced by methods as well as by ordinary users (“clients”) of an object. In other words, classes are
not usable to implement pure abstract data types. In fact, nothing in Python makes it possible to enforce data hiding — it is all
based upon convention. (On the other hand, the Python implementation, written in C, can completely hide implementation
details and control access to an object if necessary; this can be used by extensions to Python written in C.)

Clients should use data attributes with care — clients may mess up invariants maintained by the methods by stamping on their
data attributes. Note that clients may add data attributes of their own to an instance object without affecting the validity of the
methods, as long as name conflicts are avoided — again, a naming convention can save a lot of headaches here.

There is no shorthand for referencing data attributes (or other methods!) from within methods. I find that this actually increases
the readability of methods: there is no chance of confusing local variables and instance variables when glancing through a
method.

Often, the first argument of a method is called self. This is nothing more than a convention: the name self has absolutely no
special meaning to Python. Note, however, that by not following the convention your code may be less readable to other Python
programmers, and it is also conceivable that a class browser program might be written that relies upon such a convention.

Any function object that is a class attribute defines a method for instances of that class. It is not necessary that the function
definition is textually enclosed in the class definition: assigning a function object to a local variable in the class is also ok. For
example:
# Function defined outside the class
def f1(self, x, y):
return min(x, x+y)

class C:
f = f1

def g(self):
return 'hello world'

h = g

Now f, g and h are all attributes of class C that refer to function objects, and consequently they are all methods of instances of C
— h being exactly equivalent to g. Note that this practice usually only serves to confuse the reader of a program.

Methods may call other methods by using method attributes of the self argument:
class Bag:
def __init__(self):
self.data = []

def add(self, x):

self.data.append(x)

def addtwice(self, x):

self.add(x)
self.add(x)

Methods may reference global names in the same way as ordinary functions. The global scope associated with a method is the
module containing its definition. (A class is never used as a global scope.) While one rarely encounters a good reason for using
global data in a method, there are many legitimate uses of the global scope: for one thing, functions and modules imported into
the global scope can be used by methods, as well as functions and classes defined in it. Usually, the class containing the method
is itself defined in this global scope, and in the next section we’ll find some good reasons why a method would want to reference
its own class.

Each value is an object, and therefore has a class (also called its type). It is stored as object.__class__.

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9.5. Inheritance
Of course, a language feature would not be worthy of the name “class” without supporting inheritance. The syntax for a derived
class definition looks like this:
class DerivedClassName(BaseClassName):
<statement-1>
.
.
.
<statement-N>

The name BaseClassName must be defined in a scope containing the derived class definition. In place of a base class name,
other arbitrary expressions are also allowed. This can be useful, for example, when the base class is defined in another module:
class DerivedClassName(modname.BaseClassName):

Execution of a derived class definition proceeds the same as for a base class. When the class object is constructed, the base class
is remembered. This is used for resolving attribute references: if a requested attribute is not found in the class, the search
proceeds to look in the base class. This rule is applied recursively if the base class itself is derived from some other class.

There’s nothing special about instantiation of derived classes: DerivedClassName() creates a new instance of the class. Method
references are resolved as follows: the corresponding class attribute is searched, descending down the chain of base classes if
necessary, and the method reference is valid if this yields a function object.

Derived classes may override methods of their base classes. Because methods have no special privileges when calling other
methods of the same object, a method of a base class that calls another method defined in the same base class may end up calling
a method of a derived class that overrides it. (For C++ programmers: all methods in Python are effectively virtual.)

An overriding method in a derived class may in fact want to extend rather than simply replace the base class method of the same
name. There is a simple way to call the base class method directly: just call BaseClassName.methodname(self, arguments).
This is occasionally useful to clients as well. (Note that this only works if the base class is accessible as BaseClassName in the
global scope.)

Python has two built-in functions that work with inheritance:

• Use isinstance() to check an instance’s type: isinstance(obj, int) will be True only if obj.__class__ is int or
some class derived from int.
• Use issubclass() to check class inheritance: issubclass(bool, int) is True since bool is a subclass of int.
However, issubclass(float, int) is False since float is not a subclass of int.

9.5.1. Multiple Inheritance

Python supports a form of multiple inheritance as well. A class definition with multiple base classes looks like this:
class DerivedClassName(Base1, Base2, Base3):
<statement-1>
.
.
.
<statement-N>

For most purposes, in the simplest cases, you can think of the search for attributes inherited from a parent class as depth-first,
left-to-right, not searching twice in the same class where there is an overlap in the hierarchy. Thus, if an attribute is not found in
DerivedClassName, it is searched for in Base1, then (recursively) in the base classes of Base1, and if it was not found there, it
was searched for in Base2, and so on.

In fact, it is slightly more complex than that; the method resolution order changes dynamically to support cooperative calls to
super(). This approach is known in some other multiple-inheritance languages as call-next-method and is more powerful than
the super call found in single-inheritance languages.

Dynamic ordering is necessary because all cases of multiple inheritance exhibit one or more diamond relationships (where at
least one of the parent classes can be accessed through multiple paths from the bottommost class). For example, all classes
inherit from object, so any case of multiple inheritance provides more than one path to reach object. To keep the base classes
from being accessed more than once, the dynamic algorithm linearizes the search order in a way that preserves the left-to-right
ordering specified in each class, that calls each parent only once, and that is monotonic (meaning that a class can be subclassed
without affecting the precedence order of its parents). Taken together, these properties make it possible to design reliable and
extensible classes with multiple inheritance. For more detail, see https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.3/mro/.

9.6. Private Variables

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“Private” instance variables that cannot be accessed except from inside an object don’t exist in Python. However, there is a
convention that is followed by most Python code: a name prefixed with an underscore (e.g. _spam) should be treated as a non-
public part of the API (whether it is a function, a method or a data member). It should be considered an implementation detail
and subject to change without notice.

Since there is a valid use-case for class-private members (namely to avoid name clashes of names with names defined by
subclasses), there is limited support for such a mechanism, called name mangling. Any identifier of the form __spam (at least
two leading underscores, at most one trailing underscore) is textually replaced with _classname__spam, where classname is the
current class name with leading underscore(s) stripped. This mangling is done without regard to the syntactic position of the
identifier, as long as it occurs within the definition of a class.

Name mangling is helpful for letting subclasses override methods without breaking intraclass method calls. For example:
class Mapping:
def __init__(self, iterable):
self.items_list = []
self.__update(iterable)

def update(self, iterable):

for item in iterable:
self.items_list.append(item)

__update = update # private copy of original update() method

class MappingSubclass(Mapping):

def update(self, keys, values):

# provides new signature for update()
# but does not break __init__()
for item in zip(keys, values):
self.items_list.append(item)

The above example would work even if MappingSubclass were to introduce a __update identifier since it is replaced with
_Mapping__update in the Mapping class and _MappingSubclass__update in the MappingSubclass class respectively.

Note that the mangling rules are designed mostly to avoid accidents; it still is possible to access or modify a variable that is
considered private. This can even be useful in special circumstances, such as in the debugger.

Notice that code passed to exec() or eval() does not consider the classname of the invoking class to be the current class; this is
similar to the effect of the global statement, the effect of which is likewise restricted to code that is byte-compiled together. The
same restriction applies to getattr(), setattr() and delattr(), as well as when referencing __dict__ directly.

9.7. Odds and Ends

Sometimes it is useful to have a data type similar to the Pascal “record” or C “struct”, bundling together a few named data items.
An empty class definition will do nicely:
class Employee:
pass

john = Employee() # Create an empty employee record

# Fill the fields of the record

john.name = 'John Doe'
john.dept = 'computer lab'
john.salary = 1000

A piece of Python code that expects a particular abstract data type can often be passed a class that emulates the methods of that
data type instead. For instance, if you have a function that formats some data from a file object, you can define a class with
methods read() and readline() that get the data from a string buffer instead, and pass it as an argument.

Instance method objects have attributes, too: m.__self__ is the instance object with the method m(), and m.__func__ is the
function object corresponding to the method.

9.8. Iterators
By now you have probably noticed that most container objects can be looped over using a for statement:
for element in [1, 2, 3]:
print(element)
for element in (1, 2, 3):
print(element)
for key in {'one':1, 'two':2}:
print(key)
for char in "123":

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print(char)
for line in open("myfile.txt"):
print(line, end='')

This style of access is clear, concise, and convenient. The use of iterators pervades and unifies Python. Behind the scenes, the
for statement calls iter() on the container object. The function returns an iterator object that defines the method __next__()
which accesses elements in the container one at a time. When there are no more elements, __next__() raises a StopIteration
exception which tells the for loop to terminate. You can call the __next__() method using the next() built-in function; this
example shows how it all works:
>>> s = 'abc'
>>> it = iter(s)
>>> it
<iterator object at 0x00A1DB50>
>>> next(it)
'a'
>>> next(it)
'b'
>>> next(it)
'c'
>>> next(it)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
next(it)
StopIteration

Having seen the mechanics behind the iterator protocol, it is easy to add iterator behavior to your classes. Define an __iter__()
method which returns an object with a __next__() method. If the class defines __next__(), then __iter__() can just return
self:

class Reverse:
"""Iterator for looping over a sequence backwards."""
def __init__(self, data):
self.data = data
self.index = len(data)

def __iter__(self):
return self

def __next__(self):
if self.index == 0:
raise StopIteration
self.index = self.index - 1
return self.data[self.index]

>>> rev = Reverse('spam')

>>> iter(rev)
<__main__.Reverse object at 0x00A1DB50>
>>> for char in rev:
... print(char)
...
m
a
p
s

9.9. Generators
Generators are a simple and powerful tool for creating iterators. They are written like regular functions but use the yield
statement whenever they want to return data. Each time next() is called on it, the generator resumes where it left off (it
remembers all the data values and which statement was last executed). An example shows that generators can be trivially easy to
create:
def reverse(data):
for index in range(len(data)-1, -1, -1):
yield data[index]

>>> for char in reverse('golf'):

... print(char)
...
f
l
o
g

Anything that can be done with generators can also be done with class-based iterators as described in the previous section. What
makes generators so compact is that the __iter__() and __next__() methods are created automatically.

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Another key feature is that the local variables and execution state are automatically saved between calls. This made the function
easier to write and much more clear than an approach using instance variables like self.index and self.data.

In addition to automatic method creation and saving program state, when generators terminate, they automatically raise
StopIteration. In combination, these features make it easy to create iterators with no more effort than writing a regular
function.

9.10. Generator Expressions

Some simple generators can be coded succinctly as expressions using a syntax similar to list comprehensions but with
parentheses instead of square brackets. These expressions are designed for situations where the generator is used right away by
an enclosing function. Generator expressions are more compact but less versatile than full generator definitions and tend to be
more memory friendly than equivalent list comprehensions.

Examples:
>>> sum(i*i for i in range(10)) # sum of squares
285

>>> xvec = [10, 20, 30]

>>> yvec = [7, 5, 3]
>>> sum(x*y for x,y in zip(xvec, yvec)) # dot product
260

>>> unique_words = set(word for line in page for word in line.split())

>>> valedictorian = max((student.gpa, student.name) for student in graduates)

>>> data = 'golf'

>>> list(data[i] for i in range(len(data)-1, -1, -1))
['f', 'l', 'o', 'g']

Footnotes

[1] Except for one thing. Module objects have a secret read-only attribute called __dict__ which returns the dictionary used to
implement the module’s namespace; the name __dict__ is an attribute but not a global name. Obviously, using this violates
the abstraction of namespace implementation, and should be restricted to things like post-mortem debuggers.

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This page is licensed under the Python Software Foundation License Version 2.
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Table of Contents

• 10. Brief Tour of the Standard Library

◦ 10.1. Operating System Interface
◦ 10.2. File Wildcards
◦ 10.3. Command Line Arguments

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◦ 10.4. Error Output Redirection and Program Termination

◦ 10.5. String Pattern Matching
◦ 10.6. Mathematics
◦ 10.7. Internet Access
◦ 10.8. Dates and Times
◦ 10.9. Data Compression
◦ 10.10. Performance Measurement
◦ 10.11. Quality Control
◦ 10.12. Batteries Included

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11. Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II

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10. Brief Tour of the Standard Library

10.1. Operating System Interface
The os module provides dozens of functions for interacting with the operating system:
>>> import os
>>> os.getcwd() # Return the current working directory
'C:\\Python310'
>>> os.chdir('/server/accesslogs') # Change current working directory
>>> os.system('mkdir today') # Run the command mkdir in the system shell
0

Be sure to use the import os style instead of from os import *. This will keep os.open() from shadowing the built-in open
() function which operates much differently.

The built-in dir() and help() functions are useful as interactive aids for working with large modules like os:
>>> import os
>>> dir(os)
<returns a list of all module functions>
>>> help(os)
<returns an extensive manual page created from the module's docstrings>

For daily file and directory management tasks, the shutil module provides a higher level interface that is easier to use:
>>> import shutil
>>> shutil.copyfile('data.db', 'archive.db')
'archive.db'
>>> shutil.move('/build/executables', 'installdir')
'installdir'

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10.2. File Wildcards

The glob module provides a function for making file lists from directory wildcard searches:
>>> import glob
>>> glob.glob('*.py')
['primes.py', 'random.py', 'quote.py']

10.3. Command Line Arguments

Common utility scripts often need to process command line arguments. These arguments are stored in the sys module’s argv
attribute as a list. For instance the following output results from running python demo.py one two three at the command
line:
>>> import sys
>>> print(sys.argv)
['demo.py', 'one', 'two', 'three']

The argparse module provides a more sophisticated mechanism to process command line arguments. The following script
extracts one or more filenames and an optional number of lines to be displayed:
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(prog = 'top',

description = 'Show top lines from each file')
parser.add_argument('filenames', nargs='+')
parser.add_argument('-l', '--lines', type=int, default=10)
args = parser.parse_args()
print(args)

When run at the command line with python top.py --lines=5 alpha.txt beta.txt, the script sets args.lines to 5 and
args.filenames to ['alpha.txt', 'beta.txt'].

10.4. Error Output Redirection and Program Termination

The sys module also has attributes for stdin, stdout, and stderr. The latter is useful for emitting warnings and error messages to
make them visible even when stdout has been redirected:
>>> sys.stderr.write('Warning, log file not found starting a new one\n')
Warning, log file not found starting a new one

The most direct way to terminate a script is to use sys.exit().

10.5. String Pattern Matching

The re module provides regular expression tools for advanced string processing. For complex matching and manipulation,
regular expressions offer succinct, optimized solutions:
>>> import re
>>> re.findall(r'\bf[a-z]*', 'which foot or hand fell fastest')
['foot', 'fell', 'fastest']
>>> re.sub(r'(\b[a-z]+) \1', r'\1', 'cat in the the hat')
'cat in the hat'

When only simple capabilities are needed, string methods are preferred because they are easier to read and debug:
>>> 'tea for too'.replace('too', 'two')
'tea for two'

10.6. Mathematics
The math module gives access to the underlying C library functions for floating point math:
>>> import math
>>> math.cos(math.pi / 4)
0.70710678118654757
>>> math.log(1024, 2)
10.0

The random module provides tools for making random selections:

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>>> import random

>>> random.choice(['apple', 'pear', 'banana'])
'apple'
>>> random.sample(range(100), 10) # sampling without replacement
[30, 83, 16, 4, 8, 81, 41, 50, 18, 33]
>>> random.random() # random float
0.17970987693706186
>>> random.randrange(6) # random integer chosen from range(6)
4

The statistics module calculates basic statistical properties (the mean, median, variance, etc.) of numeric data:
>>> import statistics
>>> data = [2.75, 1.75, 1.25, 0.25, 0.5, 1.25, 3.5]
>>> statistics.mean(data)
1.6071428571428572
>>> statistics.median(data)
1.25
>>> statistics.variance(data)
1.3720238095238095

The SciPy project <https://scipy.org> has many other modules for numerical computations.

10.7. Internet Access

There are a number of modules for accessing the internet and processing internet protocols. Two of the simplest are
urllib.request for retrieving data from URLs and smtplib for sending mail:

>>> from urllib.request import urlopen

>>> with urlopen('http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl') as response:
... for line in response:
... line = line.decode('utf-8') # Decoding the binary data to text.
... if 'EST' in line or 'EDT' in line: # look for Eastern Time
... print(line)

<BR>Nov. 25, 09:43:32 PM EST

>>> import smtplib

>>> server = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
>>> server.sendmail('[email protected]', '[email protected]',
... """To: [email protected]
... From: [email protected]
...
... Beware the Ides of March.
... """)
>>> server.quit()

(Note that the second example needs a mailserver running on localhost.)

10.8. Dates and Times

The datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and times in both simple and complex ways. While date and time
arithmetic is supported, the focus of the implementation is on efficient member extraction for output formatting and
manipulation. The module also supports objects that are timezone aware.
>>> # dates are easily constructed and formatted
>>> from datetime import date
>>> now = date.today()
>>> now
datetime.date(2003, 12, 2)
>>> now.strftime("%m-%d-%y. %d %b %Y is a %A on the %d day of %B.")
'12-02-03. 02 Dec 2003 is a Tuesday on the 02 day of December.'

>>> # dates support calendar arithmetic

>>> birthday = date(1964, 7, 31)
>>> age = now - birthday
>>> age.days
14368

10.9. Data Compression

Common data archiving and compression formats are directly supported by modules including: zlib, gzip, bz2, lzma, zipfile
and tarfile.
>>> import zlib
>>> s = b'witch which has which witches wrist watch'
>>> len(s)

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41
>>> t = zlib.compress(s)
>>> len(t)
37
>>> zlib.decompress(t)
b'witch which has which witches wrist watch'
>>> zlib.crc32(s)
226805979

10.10. Performance Measurement

Some Python users develop a deep interest in knowing the relative performance of different approaches to the same problem.
Python provides a measurement tool that answers those questions immediately.

For example, it may be tempting to use the tuple packing and unpacking feature instead of the traditional approach to swapping
arguments. The timeit module quickly demonstrates a modest performance advantage:
>>> from timeit import Timer
>>> Timer('t=a; a=b; b=t', 'a=1; b=2').timeit()
0.57535828626024577
>>> Timer('a,b = b,a', 'a=1; b=2').timeit()
0.54962537085770791

In contrast to timeit’s fine level of granularity, the profile and pstats modules provide tools for identifying time critical
sections in larger blocks of code.

10.11. Quality Control

One approach for developing high quality software is to write tests for each function as it is developed and to run those tests
frequently during the development process.

The doctest module provides a tool for scanning a module and validating tests embedded in a program’s docstrings. Test
construction is as simple as cutting-and-pasting a typical call along with its results into the docstring. This improves the
documentation by providing the user with an example and it allows the doctest module to make sure the code remains true to the
documentation:
def average(values):
"""Computes the arithmetic mean of a list of numbers.

>>> print(average([20, 30, 70]))

40.0
"""
return sum(values) / len(values)

import doctest
doctest.testmod() # automatically validate the embedded tests

The unittest module is not as effortless as the doctest module, but it allows a more comprehensive set of tests to be
maintained in a separate file:
import unittest

class TestStatisticalFunctions(unittest.TestCase):

def test_average(self):
self.assertEqual(average([20, 30, 70]), 40.0)
self.assertEqual(round(average([1, 5, 7]), 1), 4.3)
with self.assertRaises(ZeroDivisionError):
average([])
with self.assertRaises(TypeError):
average(20, 30, 70)

unittest.main() # Calling from the command line invokes all tests

10.12. Batteries Included

Python has a “batteries included” philosophy. This is best seen through the sophisticated and robust capabilities of its larger
packages. For example:

• The xmlrpc.client and xmlrpc.server modules make implementing remote procedure calls into an almost trivial task.
Despite the modules names, no direct knowledge or handling of XML is needed.
• The email package is a library for managing email messages, including MIME and other RFC 2822-based message
documents. Unlike smtplib and poplib which actually send and receive messages, the email package has a complete

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toolset for building or decoding complex message structures (including attachments) and for implementing internet
encoding and header protocols.
• The json package provides robust support for parsing this popular data interchange format. The csv module supports
direct reading and writing of files in Comma-Separated Value format, commonly supported by databases and
spreadsheets. XML processing is supported by the xml.etree.ElementTree, xml.dom and xml.sax packages. Together,
these modules and packages greatly simplify data interchange between Python applications and other tools.
• The sqlite3 module is a wrapper for the SQLite database library, providing a persistent database that can be updated and
accessed using slightly nonstandard SQL syntax.
• Internationalization is supported by a number of modules including gettext, locale, and the codecs package.

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Table of Contents

• 11. Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II

◦ 11.1. Output Formatting
◦ 11.2. Templating
◦ 11.3. Working with Binary Data Record Layouts
◦ 11.4. Multi-threading
◦ 11.5. Logging
◦ 11.6. Weak References
◦ 11.7. Tools for Working with Lists
◦ 11.8. Decimal Floating Point Arithmetic

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11. Brief Tour of the Standard Library — Part II

This second tour covers more advanced modules that support professional programming needs. These modules rarely occur in
small scripts.

11.1. Output Formatting

The reprlib module provides a version of repr() customized for abbreviated displays of large or deeply nested containers:
>>> import reprlib
>>> reprlib.repr(set('supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'))
"{'a', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', ...}"

The pprint module offers more sophisticated control over printing both built-in and user defined objects in a way that is
readable by the interpreter. When the result is longer than one line, the “pretty printer” adds line breaks and indentation to more
clearly reveal data structure:
>>> import pprint
>>> t = [[[['black', 'cyan'], 'white', ['green', 'red']], [['magenta',
... 'yellow'], 'blue']]]
...
>>> pprint.pprint(t, width=30)
[[[['black', 'cyan'],
'white',
['green', 'red']],
[['magenta', 'yellow'],
'blue']]]

The textwrap module formats paragraphs of text to fit a given screen width:
>>> import textwrap
>>> doc = """The wrap() method is just like fill() except that it returns
... a list of strings instead of one big string with newlines to separate
... the wrapped lines."""
...
>>> print(textwrap.fill(doc, width=40))
The wrap() method is just like fill()
except that it returns a list of strings
instead of one big string with newlines
to separate the wrapped lines.

The locale module accesses a database of culture specific data formats. The grouping attribute of locale’s format function
provides a direct way of formatting numbers with group separators:
>>> import locale
>>> locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'English_United States.1252')
'English_United States.1252'
>>> conv = locale.localeconv() # get a mapping of conventions
>>> x = 1234567.8
>>> locale.format("%d", x, grouping=True)
'1,234,567'
>>> locale.format_string("%s%.*f", (conv['currency_symbol'],
... conv['frac_digits'], x), grouping=True)
'$1,234,567.80'

11.2. Templating
The string module includes a versatile Template class with a simplified syntax suitable for editing by end-users. This allows
users to customize their applications without having to alter the application.

The format uses placeholder names formed by $ with valid Python identifiers (alphanumeric characters and underscores).
Surrounding the placeholder with braces allows it to be followed by more alphanumeric letters with no intervening spaces.
Writing $$ creates a single escaped $:
>>> from string import Template
>>> t = Template('${village}folk send $$10 to $cause.')

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>>> t.substitute(village='Nottingham', cause='the ditch fund')

'Nottinghamfolk send $10 to the ditch fund.'

The substitute() method raises a KeyError when a placeholder is not supplied in a dictionary or a keyword argument. For
mail-merge style applications, user supplied data may be incomplete and the safe_substitute() method may be more
appropriate — it will leave placeholders unchanged if data is missing:
>>> t = Template('Return the $item to $owner.')
>>> d = dict(item='unladen swallow')
>>> t.substitute(d)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
KeyError: 'owner'
>>> t.safe_substitute(d)
'Return the unladen swallow to $owner.'

Template subclasses can specify a custom delimiter. For example, a batch renaming utility for a photo browser may elect to use
percent signs for placeholders such as the current date, image sequence number, or file format:
>>> import time, os.path
>>> photofiles = ['img_1074.jpg', 'img_1076.jpg', 'img_1077.jpg']
>>> class BatchRename(Template):
... delimiter = '%'
>>> fmt = input('Enter rename style (%d-date %n-seqnum %f-format): ')
Enter rename style (%d-date %n-seqnum %f-format): Ashley_%n%f

>>> t = BatchRename(fmt)
>>> date = time.strftime('%d%b%y')
>>> for i, filename in enumerate(photofiles):
... base, ext = os.path.splitext(filename)
... newname = t.substitute(d=date, n=i, f=ext)
... print('{0} --> {1}'.format(filename, newname))

img_1074.jpg --> Ashley_0.jpg

img_1076.jpg --> Ashley_1.jpg
img_1077.jpg --> Ashley_2.jpg

Another application for templating is separating program logic from the details of multiple output formats. This makes it
possible to substitute custom templates for XML files, plain text reports, and HTML web reports.

11.3. Working with Binary Data Record Layouts

The struct module provides pack() and unpack() functions for working with variable length binary record formats. The
following example shows how to loop through header information in a ZIP file without using the zipfile module. Pack codes
"H" and "I" represent two and four byte unsigned numbers respectively. The "<" indicates that they are standard size and in
little-endian byte order:
import struct

with open('myfile.zip', 'rb') as f:

data = f.read()

start = 0
for i in range(3): # show the first 3 file headers
start += 14
fields = struct.unpack('<IIIHH', data[start:start+16])
crc32, comp_size, uncomp_size, filenamesize, extra_size = fields

start += 16
filename = data[start:start+filenamesize]
start += filenamesize
extra = data[start:start+extra_size]
print(filename, hex(crc32), comp_size, uncomp_size)

start += extra_size + comp_size # skip to the next header

11.4. Multi-threading
Threading is a technique for decoupling tasks which are not sequentially dependent. Threads can be used to improve the
responsiveness of applications that accept user input while other tasks run in the background. A related use case is running I/O in
parallel with computations in another thread.

The following code shows how the high level threading module can run tasks in background while the main program continues
to run:
import threading, zipfile

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class AsyncZip(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self, infile, outfile):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.infile = infile
self.outfile = outfile

def run(self):
f = zipfile.ZipFile(self.outfile, 'w', zipfile.ZIP_DEFLATED)
f.write(self.infile)
f.close()
print('Finished background zip of:', self.infile)

background = AsyncZip('mydata.txt', 'myarchive.zip')

background.start()
print('The main program continues to run in foreground.')

background.join() # Wait for the background task to finish

print('Main program waited until background was done.')

The principal challenge of multi-threaded applications is coordinating threads that share data or other resources. To that end, the
threading module provides a number of synchronization primitives including locks, events, condition variables, and semaphores.

While those tools are powerful, minor design errors can result in problems that are difficult to reproduce. So, the preferred
approach to task coordination is to concentrate all access to a resource in a single thread and then use the queue module to feed
that thread with requests from other threads. Applications using Queue objects for inter-thread communication and coordination
are easier to design, more readable, and more reliable.

11.5. Logging
The logging module offers a full featured and flexible logging system. At its simplest, log messages are sent to a file or to
sys.stderr:

import logging
logging.debug('Debugging information')
logging.info('Informational message')
logging.warning('Warning:config file %s not found', 'server.conf')
logging.error('Error occurred')
logging.critical('Critical error -- shutting down')

This produces the following output:

WARNING:root:Warning:config file server.conf not found
ERROR:root:Error occurred
CRITICAL:root:Critical error -- shutting down

By default, informational and debugging messages are suppressed and the output is sent to standard error. Other output options
include routing messages through email, datagrams, sockets, or to an HTTP Server. New filters can select different routing based
on message priority: DEBUG, INFO, WARNING, ERROR, and CRITICAL.

The logging system can be configured directly from Python or can be loaded from a user editable configuration file for
customized logging without altering the application.

11.6. Weak References

Python does automatic memory management (reference counting for most objects and garbage collection to eliminate cycles).
The memory is freed shortly after the last reference to it has been eliminated.

This approach works fine for most applications but occasionally there is a need to track objects only as long as they are being
used by something else. Unfortunately, just tracking them creates a reference that makes them permanent. The weakref module
provides tools for tracking objects without creating a reference. When the object is no longer needed, it is automatically removed
from a weakref table and a callback is triggered for weakref objects. Typical applications include caching objects that are
expensive to create:
>>> import weakref, gc
>>> class A:
... def __init__(self, value):
... self.value = value
... def __repr__(self):
... return str(self.value)
...
>>> a = A(10) # create a reference
>>> d = weakref.WeakValueDictionary()
>>> d['primary'] = a # does not create a reference
>>> d['primary'] # fetch the object if it is still alive
10
>>> del a # remove the one reference

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>>> gc.collect() # run garbage collection right away

0
>>> d['primary'] # entry was automatically removed
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
d['primary'] # entry was automatically removed
File "C:/python310/lib/weakref.py", line 46, in __getitem__
o = self.data[key]()
KeyError: 'primary'

11.7. Tools for Working with Lists

Many data structure needs can be met with the built-in list type. However, sometimes there is a need for alternative
implementations with different performance trade-offs.

The array module provides an array() object that is like a list that stores only homogeneous data and stores it more compactly.
The following example shows an array of numbers stored as two byte unsigned binary numbers (typecode "H") rather than the
usual 16 bytes per entry for regular lists of Python int objects:
>>> from array import array
>>> a = array('H', [4000, 10, 700, 22222])
>>> sum(a)
26932
>>> a[1:3]
array('H', [10, 700])

The collections module provides a deque() object that is like a list with faster appends and pops from the left side but slower
lookups in the middle. These objects are well suited for implementing queues and breadth first tree searches:
>>> from collections import deque
>>> d = deque(["task1", "task2", "task3"])
>>> d.append("task4")
>>> print("Handling", d.popleft())
Handling task1

unsearched = deque([starting_node])
def breadth_first_search(unsearched):
node = unsearched.popleft()
for m in gen_moves(node):
if is_goal(m):
return m
unsearched.append(m)

In addition to alternative list implementations, the library also offers other tools such as the bisect module with functions for
manipulating sorted lists:
>>> import bisect
>>> scores = [(100, 'perl'), (200, 'tcl'), (400, 'lua'), (500, 'python')]
>>> bisect.insort(scores, (300, 'ruby'))
>>> scores
[(100, 'perl'), (200, 'tcl'), (300, 'ruby'), (400, 'lua'), (500, 'python')]

The heapq module provides functions for implementing heaps based on regular lists. The lowest valued entry is always kept at
position zero. This is useful for applications which repeatedly access the smallest element but do not want to run a full list sort:
>>> from heapq import heapify, heappop, heappush
>>> data = [1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 2, 4, 6, 8, 0]
>>> heapify(data) # rearrange the list into heap order
>>> heappush(data, -5) # add a new entry
>>> [heappop(data) for i in range(3)] # fetch the three smallest entries
[-5, 0, 1]

11.8. Decimal Floating Point Arithmetic

The decimal module offers a Decimal datatype for decimal floating point arithmetic. Compared to the built-in float
implementation of binary floating point, the class is especially helpful for

• financial applications and other uses which require exact decimal representation,
• control over precision,
• control over rounding to meet legal or regulatory requirements,
• tracking of significant decimal places, or
• applications where the user expects the results to match calculations done by hand.

For example, calculating a 5% tax on a 70 cent phone charge gives different results in decimal floating point and binary floating
point. The difference becomes significant if the results are rounded to the nearest cent:

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>>> from decimal import *

>>> round(Decimal('0.70') * Decimal('1.05'), 2)
Decimal('0.74')
>>> round(.70 * 1.05, 2)
0.73

The Decimal result keeps a trailing zero, automatically inferring four place significance from multiplicands with two place
significance. Decimal reproduces mathematics as done by hand and avoids issues that can arise when binary floating point
cannot exactly represent decimal quantities.

Exact representation enables the Decimal class to perform modulo calculations and equality tests that are unsuitable for binary
floating point:
>>> Decimal('1.00') % Decimal('.10')
Decimal('0.00')
>>> 1.00 % 0.10
0.09999999999999995

>>> sum([Decimal('0.1')]*10) == Decimal('1.0')

True
>>> sum([0.1]*10) == 1.0
False

The decimal module provides arithmetic with as much precision as needed:

>>> getcontext().prec = 36
>>> Decimal(1) / Decimal(7)
Decimal('0.142857142857142857142857142857142857')

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Table of Contents

• 12. Virtual Environments and Packages

◦ 12.1. Introduction
◦ 12.2. Creating Virtual Environments
◦ 12.3. Managing Packages with pip

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12. Virtual Environments and Packages

12.1. Introduction
Python applications will often use packages and modules that don’t come as part of the standard library. Applications will
sometimes need a specific version of a library, because the application may require that a particular bug has been fixed or the
application may be written using an obsolete version of the library’s interface.

This means it may not be possible for one Python installation to meet the requirements of every application. If application A
needs version 1.0 of a particular module but application B needs version 2.0, then the requirements are in conflict and installing
either version 1.0 or 2.0 will leave one application unable to run.

The solution for this problem is to create a virtual environment, a self-contained directory tree that contains a Python installation
for a particular version of Python, plus a number of additional packages.

Different applications can then use different virtual environments. To resolve the earlier example of conflicting requirements,
application A can have its own virtual environment with version 1.0 installed while application B has another virtual
environment with version 2.0. If application B requires a library be upgraded to version 3.0, this will not affect application A’s
environment.

12.2. Creating Virtual Environments

The module used to create and manage virtual environments is called venv. venv will usually install the most recent version of
Python that you have available. If you have multiple versions of Python on your system, you can select a specific Python version
by running python3 or whichever version you want.

To create a virtual environment, decide upon a directory where you want to place it, and run the venv module as a script with the
directory path:
python3 -m venv tutorial-env

This will create the tutorial-env directory if it doesn’t exist, and also create directories inside it containing a copy of the
Python interpreter and various supporting files.

A common directory location for a virtual environment is .venv. This name keeps the directory typically hidden in your shell
and thus out of the way while giving it a name that explains why the directory exists. It also prevents clashing with .env
environment variable definition files that some tooling supports.

Once you’ve created a virtual environment, you may activate it.

On Windows, run:
tutorial-env\Scripts\activate.bat

On Unix or MacOS, run:

source tutorial-env/bin/activate

(This script is written for the bash shell. If you use the csh or fish shells, there are alternate activate.csh and activate.fish
scripts you should use instead.)

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Activating the virtual environment will change your shell’s prompt to show what virtual environment you’re using, and modify
the environment so that running python will get you that particular version and installation of Python. For example:
$ source ~/envs/tutorial-env/bin/activate
(tutorial-env) $ python
Python 3.5.1 (default, May 6 2016, 10:59:36)
...
>>> import sys
>>> sys.path
['', '/usr/local/lib/python35.zip', ...,
'~/envs/tutorial-env/lib/python3.5/site-packages']
>>>

12.3. Managing Packages with pip

You can install, upgrade, and remove packages using a program called pip. By default pip will install packages from the Python
Package Index, <https://pypi.org>. You can browse the Python Package Index by going to it in your web browser.

pip has a number of subcommands: “install”, “uninstall”, “freeze”, etc. (Consult the Installing Python Modules guide for
complete documentation for pip.)

You can install the latest version of a package by specifying a package’s name:
(tutorial-env) $ python -m pip install novas
Collecting novas
Downloading novas-3.1.1.3.tar.gz (136kB)
Installing collected packages: novas
Running setup.py install for novas
Successfully installed novas-3.1.1.3

You can also install a specific version of a package by giving the package name followed by == and the version number:
(tutorial-env) $ python -m pip install requests==2.6.0
Collecting requests==2.6.0
Using cached requests-2.6.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: requests
Successfully installed requests-2.6.0

If you re-run this command, pip will notice that the requested version is already installed and do nothing. You can supply a
different version number to get that version, or you can run pip install --upgrade to upgrade the package to the latest
version:
(tutorial-env) $ python -m pip install --upgrade requests
Collecting requests
Installing collected packages: requests
Found existing installation: requests 2.6.0
Uninstalling requests-2.6.0:
Successfully uninstalled requests-2.6.0
Successfully installed requests-2.7.0

pip uninstall followed by one or more package names will remove the packages from the virtual environment.

pip show will display information about a particular package:

(tutorial-env) $ pip show requests

---
Metadata-Version: 2.0
Name: requests
Version: 2.7.0
Summary: Python HTTP for Humans.
Home-page: http://python-requests.org
Author: Kenneth Reitz
Author-email: [email protected]
License: Apache 2.0
Location: /Users/akuchling/envs/tutorial-env/lib/python3.4/site-packages
Requires:

pip list will display all of the packages installed in the virtual environment:

(tutorial-env) $ pip list

novas (3.1.1.3)
numpy (1.9.2)
pip (7.0.3)
requests (2.7.0)
setuptools (16.0)

pip freeze will produce a similar list of the installed packages, but the output uses the format that pip install expects. A
common convention is to put this list in a requirements.txt file:

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(tutorial-env) $ pip freeze > requirements.txt

(tutorial-env) $ cat requirements.txt
novas==3.1.1.3
numpy==1.9.2
requests==2.7.0

The requirements.txt can then be committed to version control and shipped as part of an application. Users can then install all
the necessary packages with install -r:
(tutorial-env) $ python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
Collecting novas==3.1.1.3 (from -r requirements.txt (line 1))
...
Collecting numpy==1.9.2 (from -r requirements.txt (line 2))
...
Collecting requests==2.7.0 (from -r requirements.txt (line 3))
...
Installing collected packages: novas, numpy, requests
Running setup.py install for novas
Successfully installed novas-3.1.1.3 numpy-1.9.2 requests-2.7.0

pip has many more options. Consult the Installing Python Modules guide for complete documentation for pip. When you’ve
written a package and want to make it available on the Python Package Index, consult the Distributing Python Modules guide.

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13. What Now?

Reading this tutorial has probably reinforced your interest in using Python — you should be eager to apply Python to solving
your real-world problems. Where should you go to learn more?

This tutorial is part of Python’s documentation set. Some other documents in the set are:

• The Python Standard Library:

You should browse through this manual, which gives complete (though terse) reference material about types, functions,
and the modules in the standard library. The standard Python distribution includes a lot of additional code. There are
modules to read Unix mailboxes, retrieve documents via HTTP, generate random numbers, parse command-line options,
write CGI programs, compress data, and many other tasks. Skimming through the Library Reference will give you an idea
of what’s available.

• Installing Python Modules explains how to install additional modules written by other Python users.

• The Python Language Reference: A detailed explanation of Python’s syntax and semantics. It’s heavy reading, but is
useful as a complete guide to the language itself.

More Python resources:

• https://www.python.org: The major Python web site. It contains code, documentation, and pointers to Python-related
pages around the web. This web site is mirrored in various places around the world, such as Europe, Japan, and Australia;
a mirror may be faster than the main site, depending on your geographical location.
• https://docs.python.org: Fast access to Python’s documentation.
• https://pypi.org: The Python Package Index, previously also nicknamed the Cheese Shop [1], is an index of user-created
Python modules that are available for download. Once you begin releasing code, you can register it here so that others can
find it.
• https://code.activestate.com/recipes/langs/python/: The Python Cookbook is a sizable collection of code examples, larger
modules, and useful scripts. Particularly notable contributions are collected in a book also titled Python Cookbook
(O’Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00797-3.)
• http://www.pyvideo.org collects links to Python-related videos from conferences and user-group meetings.
• https://scipy.org: The Scientific Python project includes modules for fast array computations and manipulations plus a host
of packages for such things as linear algebra, Fourier transforms, non-linear solvers, random number distributions,
statistical analysis and the like.

For Python-related questions and problem reports, you can post to the newsgroup comp.lang.python, or send them to the mailing
list at [email protected]. The newsgroup and mailing list are gatewayed, so messages posted to one will automatically be
forwarded to the other. There are hundreds of postings a day, asking (and answering) questions, suggesting new features, and
announcing new modules. Mailing list archives are available at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/.

Before posting, be sure to check the list of Frequently Asked Questions (also called the FAQ). The FAQ answers many of the
questions that come up again and again, and may already contain the solution for your problem.

Footnotes

[1] “Cheese Shop” is a Monty Python’s sketch: a customer enters a cheese shop, but whatever cheese he asks for, the clerk says
it’s missing.

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• 14. Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution

◦ 14.1. Tab Completion and History Editing
◦ 14.2. Alternatives to the Interactive Interpreter

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14. Interactive Input Editing and History Substitution

Some versions of the Python interpreter support editing of the current input line and history substitution, similar to facilities
found in the Korn shell and the GNU Bash shell. This is implemented using the GNU Readline library, which supports various
styles of editing. This library has its own documentation which we won’t duplicate here.

14.1. Tab Completion and History Editing

Completion of variable and module names is automatically enabled at interpreter startup so that the Tab key invokes the
completion function; it looks at Python statement names, the current local variables, and the available module names. For dotted
expressions such as string.a, it will evaluate the expression up to the final '.' and then suggest completions from the
attributes of the resulting object. Note that this may execute application-defined code if an object with a __getattr__() method
is part of the expression. The default configuration also saves your history into a file named .python_history in your user
directory. The history will be available again during the next interactive interpreter session.

14.2. Alternatives to the Interactive Interpreter

This facility is an enormous step forward compared to earlier versions of the interpreter; however, some wishes are left: It would
be nice if the proper indentation were suggested on continuation lines (the parser knows if an indent token is required next). The

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completion mechanism might use the interpreter’s symbol table. A command to check (or even suggest) matching parentheses,
quotes, etc., would also be useful.

One alternative enhanced interactive interpreter that has been around for quite some time is IPython, which features tab
completion, object exploration and advanced history management. It can also be thoroughly customized and embedded into
other applications. Another similar enhanced interactive environment is bpython.

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15. Floating Point Arithmetic: Issues and Limitations

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Floating-point numbers are represented in computer hardware as base 2 (binary) fractions. For example, the decimal fraction
0.125

has value 1/10 + 2/100 + 5/1000, and in the same way the binary fraction
0.001

has value 0/2 + 0/4 + 1/8. These two fractions have identical values, the only real difference being that the first is written in base
10 fractional notation, and the second in base 2.

Unfortunately, most decimal fractions cannot be represented exactly as binary fractions. A consequence is that, in general, the
decimal floating-point numbers you enter are only approximated by the binary floating-point numbers actually stored in the
machine.

The problem is easier to understand at first in base 10. Consider the fraction 1/3. You can approximate that as a base 10 fraction:
0.3

or, better,
0.33

or, better,
0.333

and so on. No matter how many digits you’re willing to write down, the result will never be exactly 1/3, but will be an
increasingly better approximation of 1/3.

In the same way, no matter how many base 2 digits you’re willing to use, the decimal value 0.1 cannot be represented exactly as
a base 2 fraction. In base 2, 1/10 is the infinitely repeating fraction
0.0001100110011001100110011001100110011001100110011...

Stop at any finite number of bits, and you get an approximation. On most machines today, floats are approximated using a binary
fraction with the numerator using the first 53 bits starting with the most significant bit and with the denominator as a power of
two. In the case of 1/10, the binary fraction is 3602879701896397 / 2 ** 55 which is close to but not exactly equal to the true
value of 1/10.

Many users are not aware of the approximation because of the way values are displayed. Python only prints a decimal
approximation to the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored by the machine. On most machines, if Python were
to print the true decimal value of the binary approximation stored for 0.1, it would have to display
>>> 0.1
0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625

That is more digits than most people find useful, so Python keeps the number of digits manageable by displaying a rounded
value instead
>>> 1 / 10
0.1

Just remember, even though the printed result looks like the exact value of 1/10, the actual stored value is the nearest
representable binary fraction.

Interestingly, there are many different decimal numbers that share the same nearest approximate binary fraction. For example,
the numbers 0.1 and 0.10000000000000001 and 0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625 are all
approximated by 3602879701896397 / 2 ** 55. Since all of these decimal values share the same approximation, any one of
them could be displayed while still preserving the invariant eval(repr(x)) == x.

Historically, the Python prompt and built-in repr() function would choose the one with 17 significant digits,
0.10000000000000001. Starting with Python 3.1, Python (on most systems) is now able to choose the shortest of these and
simply display 0.1.

Note that this is in the very nature of binary floating-point: this is not a bug in Python, and it is not a bug in your code either.
You’ll see the same kind of thing in all languages that support your hardware’s floating-point arithmetic (although some
languages may not display the difference by default, or in all output modes).

For more pleasant output, you may wish to use string formatting to produce a limited number of significant digits:
>>> format(math.pi, '.12g') # give 12 significant digits
'3.14159265359'

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>>> format(math.pi, '.2f') # give 2 digits after the point

'3.14'

>>> repr(math.pi)
'3.141592653589793'

It’s important to realize that this is, in a real sense, an illusion: you’re simply rounding the display of the true machine value.

One illusion may beget another. For example, since 0.1 is not exactly 1/10, summing three values of 0.1 may not yield exactly
0.3, either:
>>> .1 + .1 + .1 == .3
False

Also, since the 0.1 cannot get any closer to the exact value of 1/10 and 0.3 cannot get any closer to the exact value of 3/10, then
pre-rounding with round() function cannot help:
>>> round(.1, 1) + round(.1, 1) + round(.1, 1) == round(.3, 1)
False

Though the numbers cannot be made closer to their intended exact values, the round() function can be useful for post-rounding
so that results with inexact values become comparable to one another:
>>> round(.1 + .1 + .1, 10) == round(.3, 10)
True

Binary floating-point arithmetic holds many surprises like this. The problem with “0.1” is explained in precise detail below, in
the “Representation Error” section. See The Perils of Floating Point for a more complete account of other common surprises.

As that says near the end, “there are no easy answers.” Still, don’t be unduly wary of floating-point! The errors in Python float
operations are inherited from the floating-point hardware, and on most machines are on the order of no more than 1 part in
2**53 per operation. That’s more than adequate for most tasks, but you do need to keep in mind that it’s not decimal arithmetic
and that every float operation can suffer a new rounding error.

While pathological cases do exist, for most casual use of floating-point arithmetic you’ll see the result you expect in the end if
you simply round the display of your final results to the number of decimal digits you expect. str() usually suffices, and for
finer control see the str.format() method’s format specifiers in Format String Syntax.

For use cases which require exact decimal representation, try using the decimal module which implements decimal arithmetic
suitable for accounting applications and high-precision applications.

Another form of exact arithmetic is supported by the fractions module which implements arithmetic based on rational
numbers (so the numbers like 1/3 can be represented exactly).

If you are a heavy user of floating point operations you should take a look at the NumPy package and many other packages for
mathematical and statistical operations supplied by the SciPy project. See <https://scipy.org>.

Python provides tools that may help on those rare occasions when you really do want to know the exact value of a float. The
float.as_integer_ratio() method expresses the value of a float as a fraction:

>>> x = 3.14159
>>> x.as_integer_ratio()
(3537115888337719, 1125899906842624)

Since the ratio is exact, it can be used to losslessly recreate the original value:
>>> x == 3537115888337719 / 1125899906842624
True

The float.hex() method expresses a float in hexadecimal (base 16), again giving the exact value stored by your computer:
>>> x.hex()
'0x1.921f9f01b866ep+1'

This precise hexadecimal representation can be used to reconstruct the float value exactly:
>>> x == float.fromhex('0x1.921f9f01b866ep+1')
True

Since the representation is exact, it is useful for reliably porting values across different versions of Python (platform
independence) and exchanging data with other languages that support the same format (such as Java and C99).

Another helpful tool is the math.fsum() function which helps mitigate loss-of-precision during summation. It tracks “lost
digits” as values are added onto a running total. That can make a difference in overall accuracy so that the errors do not
accumulate to the point where they affect the final total:

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>>> sum([0.1] * 10) == 1.0

False
>>> math.fsum([0.1] * 10) == 1.0
True

15.1. Representation Error

This section explains the “0.1” example in detail, and shows how you can perform an exact analysis of cases like this yourself.
Basic familiarity with binary floating-point representation is assumed.

Representation error refers to the fact that some (most, actually) decimal fractions cannot be represented exactly as binary (base
2) fractions. This is the chief reason why Python (or Perl, C, C++, Java, Fortran, and many others) often won’t display the exact
decimal number you expect.

Why is that? 1/10 is not exactly representable as a binary fraction. Almost all machines today (November 2000) use IEEE-754
floating point arithmetic, and almost all platforms map Python floats to IEEE-754 “double precision”. 754 doubles contain 53
bits of precision, so on input the computer strives to convert 0.1 to the closest fraction it can of the form J/2**N where J is an
integer containing exactly 53 bits. Rewriting
1 / 10 ~= J / (2**N)

as
J ~= 2**N / 10

and recalling that J has exactly 53 bits (is >= 2**52 but < 2**53), the best value for N is 56:
>>> 2**52 <= 2**56 // 10 < 2**53
True

That is, 56 is the only value for N that leaves J with exactly 53 bits. The best possible value for J is then that quotient rounded:
>>> q, r = divmod(2**56, 10)
>>> r
6

Since the remainder is more than half of 10, the best approximation is obtained by rounding up:
>>> q+1
7205759403792794

Therefore the best possible approximation to 1/10 in 754 double precision is:
7205759403792794 / 2 ** 56

Dividing both the numerator and denominator by two reduces the fraction to:
3602879701896397 / 2 ** 55

Note that since we rounded up, this is actually a little bit larger than 1/10; if we had not rounded up, the quotient would have
been a little bit smaller than 1/10. But in no case can it be exactly 1/10!

So the computer never “sees” 1/10: what it sees is the exact fraction given above, the best 754 double approximation it can get:
>>> 0.1 * 2 ** 55
3602879701896397.0

If we multiply that fraction by 10**55, we can see the value out to 55 decimal digits:
>>> 3602879701896397 * 10 ** 55 // 2 ** 55
1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625

meaning that the exact number stored in the computer is equal to the decimal value
0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625. Instead of displaying the full decimal value, many
languages (including older versions of Python), round the result to 17 significant digits:
>>> format(0.1, '.17f')
'0.10000000000000001'

The fractions and decimal modules make these calculations easy:

>>> from decimal import Decimal
>>> from fractions import Fraction

>>> Fraction.from_float(0.1)
Fraction(3602879701896397, 36028797018963968)

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>>> (0.1).as_integer_ratio()
(3602879701896397, 36028797018963968)

>>> Decimal.from_float(0.1)
Decimal('0.1000000000000000055511151231257827021181583404541015625')

>>> format(Decimal.from_float(0.1), '.17')

'0.10000000000000001'

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• 16. Appendix
◦ 16.1. Interactive Mode
◾ 16.1.1. Error Handling
◾ 16.1.2. Executable Python Scripts
◾ 16.1.3. The Interactive Startup File
◾ 16.1.4. The Customization Modules

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16. Appendix
16.1. Interactive Mode
16.1.1. Error Handling

When an error occurs, the interpreter prints an error message and a stack trace. In interactive mode, it then returns to the primary
prompt; when input came from a file, it exits with a nonzero exit status after printing the stack trace. (Exceptions handled by an
except clause in a try statement are not errors in this context.) Some errors are unconditionally fatal and cause an exit with a
nonzero exit; this applies to internal inconsistencies and some cases of running out of memory. All error messages are written to
the standard error stream; normal output from executed commands is written to standard output.

Typing the interrupt character (usually Control-C or Delete) to the primary or secondary prompt cancels the input and returns
to the primary prompt. [1] Typing an interrupt while a command is executing raises the KeyboardInterrupt exception, which
may be handled by a try statement.

16.1.2. Executable Python Scripts

On BSD’ish Unix systems, Python scripts can be made directly executable, like shell scripts, by putting the line
#!/usr/bin/env python3.5

(assuming that the interpreter is on the user’s PATH) at the beginning of the script and giving the file an executable mode. The #!
must be the first two characters of the file. On some platforms, this first line must end with a Unix-style line ending ('\n'), not a
Windows ('\r\n') line ending. Note that the hash, or pound, character, '#', is used to start a comment in Python.

The script can be given an executable mode, or permission, using the chmod command.
$ chmod +x myscript.py

On Windows systems, there is no notion of an “executable mode”. The Python installer automatically associates .py files with
python.exe so that a double-click on a Python file will run it as a script. The extension can also be .pyw, in that case, the
console window that normally appears is suppressed.

16.1.3. The Interactive Startup File

When you use Python interactively, it is frequently handy to have some standard commands executed every time the interpreter
is started. You can do this by setting an environment variable named PYTHONSTARTUP to the name of a file containing your start-
up commands. This is similar to the .profile feature of the Unix shells.

This file is only read in interactive sessions, not when Python reads commands from a script, and not when /dev/tty is given as
the explicit source of commands (which otherwise behaves like an interactive session). It is executed in the same namespace
where interactive commands are executed, so that objects that it defines or imports can be used without qualification in the
interactive session. You can also change the prompts sys.ps1 and sys.ps2 in this file.

If you want to read an additional start-up file from the current directory, you can program this in the global start-up file using
code like if os.path.isfile('.pythonrc.py'): exec(open('.pythonrc.py').read()). If you want to use the startup file
in a script, you must do this explicitly in the script:
import os
filename = os.environ.get('PYTHONSTARTUP')
if filename and os.path.isfile(filename):
with open(filename) as fobj:
startup_file = fobj.read()
exec(startup_file)

16.1.4. The Customization Modules

Python provides two hooks to let you customize it: sitecustomize and usercustomize. To see how it works, you need first to
find the location of your user site-packages directory. Start Python and run this code:
>>> import site
>>> site.getusersitepackages()
'/home/user/.local/lib/python3.5/site-packages'

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Now you can create a file named usercustomize.py in that directory and put anything you want in it. It will affect every
invocation of Python, unless it is started with the -s option to disable the automatic import.

sitecustomize works in the same way, but is typically created by an administrator of the computer in the global site-packages
directory, and is imported before usercustomize. See the documentation of the site module for more details.

Footnotes

[1] A problem with the GNU Readline package may prevent this.

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