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¶
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
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.
Other modifiers can be used to convert the value before it is formatted. ‘!a’ applies ascii() , ‘!s’ applies str() , and ‘!r’ applies repr() :
The = specifier can be used to expand an expression to the text of the expression, an equal sign, then the representation of the evaluated expression:
See self-documenting expressions for more information on the = specifier. 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:
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.
If keyword arguments are used in the str.format() method, their values are referred to by using the name of the argument.
Positional and keyword arguments can be arbitrarily combined:
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.
This could also be done by passing the table dictionary as keyword arguments with the ** notation.
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 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:
(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:
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:
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 positional arguments and one keyword argument: open(filename, mode, encoding=None)
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() ). Because UTF-8 is the modern de-facto standard, encoding="utf-8" is recommended unless you know that you need to use a different encoding. Appending a ‘b’ to the mode opens the file in binary mode. Binary mode data is read and written as bytes objects. You can not specify encoding when opening file in binary mode.
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:
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.
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.
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.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.
For reading lines from a file, you can loop over the file object. This is memory efficient, fast, and leads to simple code:
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
To decode the object again, if f is a binary file or text file object which has been opened for reading:
JSON files must be encoded in UTF-8. Use encoding="utf-8" when opening JSON file as a text file for both of reading and writing.
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.
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.
Ввод и вывод данных в Python
Для вывода данных в Python используется функция print(), а для получения пользовательского ввода — функция input().
Вывод в Python
В Python мы можем просто использовать функцию print() для вывода данных. Например:
Здесь функция print() выводит строку, заключенную в одинарные кавычки.
Синтаксис функции print():
Функция print() может иметь 5 параметров:
object — значение(я) для вывода;
sep (от «separator», необязательно) — позволяет разделить несколько объектов для вывода внутри функции print();
end (необязательно) — позволяет добавлять специальные значения, например, новая строка ‘\n’ или отступ ‘\t’ ;
file (необязательно) — позволяет указать место для вывода данных. По умолчанию используется значение sys.stdout (экран).
flush (необязательно) — логическое значение, указывающее, сбрасывается ли вывод или буферизуется. По умолчанию используется значение False .
Пример №1: Функция print() с одним параметром
Good Morning!
It is rainy today
Здесь функция print() имеет только 1 параметр — объект для вывода. Поскольку параметр end не указан, то используется значение по умолчанию ‘\n’ . Таким образом, мы получаем вывод в двух разных строках.
Пример №2: Функция print() с параметром end
Good Morning! It is rainy today
Обратите внимание, что мы добавили параметр end= ‘ ‘ в функцию print(). Следовательно, мы получаем вывод в одной строке, разделенной пробелом.
Пример №3: Функция print() с параметром sep
New Year. 2023. See you soon!
Здесь в функции print() используется сразу несколько элементов для вывода, разделенных запятой. Обратите внимание, что мы также добавили необязательный параметр sep= ‘. ‘ , который позволил вывести элементы через точку (а не через запятую).
Пример №4: Вывод переменных и литералов в Python
Функция print() также может использоваться для вывода переменных. Например:
5. Input and Output¶
In this section, we describe printing, which includes the use of the print function, the old-style % format specifiers and the new style <> format specifiers.
5.1. Printing to standard output (normally the screen)¶
The print function is the most commonly used command to print information to the “standard output device” which is normally the screen.
There are two modes to use print.
5.1.1. Simple print¶
The easiest way to use the print command is to list the variables to be printed, separated by comma. Here are a few examples:
Python adds a space between every object that is being printed.
Python prints a new line after every print call. To suppress that, use the end= parameter:
5.1.2. Formatted printing¶
The more sophisticated way of formatting output uses a syntax very similar to Matlab’s fprintf (and therefor also similar to C’s printf ).
The overall structure is that there is a string containing format specifiers, followed by a percentage sign and a tuple that contains the variables to be printed in place of the format specifiers.
A string can contain format identifiers (such as %f to format as a float, %d to format as an integer, and %s to format as a string):
The format specifier of type %W.Df means that a Float should be printed with a total Width of W characters and D digits behind the Decimal point. (This is identical to Matlab and C, for example.)
To print more than one object, provide multiple format specifiers and list several objects in the tuple:
Note that the conversion of a format specifier and a tuple of variables into string does not rely on the print command:
This means that we can convert objects into strings whereever we need, and we can decide to print the strings later – there is no need to couple the formatting closely to the code that does the printing.
Overview of commonly used format specifiers using the astronomical unit as an example:
Example output for AU
shorter of %e or %f
5.1.3. “str” and “__str__”¶
All objects in Python should provide a method __str__ which returns a nice string representation of the object. This method a.__str__() is called when we apply the str function to object a :
The str function is extremely convenient as it allows us to print more complicated objects, such as
The way Python prints this is that it uses the __str__ method of the list object. This will print the opening square bracket [ and then call the __str__ method of the first object, i.e. the integer 3. This will produce 3 . Then the list object’s __str__ method prints the comma , and moves on to call the __str__ method of the next element in the list (i.e. 4.2 ) to print itself. This way any composite object can be represented as a string by asking the objects it holds to convert themselves to strings.
The string method of object x is called implicitly, when we
use the “%s” format specifier to print x
pass the object x directly to the print command:
5.1.4. “repr” and “__repr__”¶
A second function, repr , should convert a given object into a string presentation so that this string can be used to re-created the object using the eval function. The repr function will generally provide a more detailed string than str . Applying repr to the object x will attempt to call x.__repr__() .
We can convert an object to its str() or repr presentation using the format specifiers %s and %r, respectively.
5.1.5. New-style string formatting¶
A new system of built-in formatting allows more flexibility for complex cases, at the cost of being a bit longer.
Basic ideas in examples:
This is a powerful and elegant way of string formatting, which is gradually being used more.
Further information
5.1.6. Changes from Python 2 to Python 3: print ¶
One (maybe the most obvious) change going from Python 2 to Python 3 is that the print command loses its special status. In Python 2, we could print “Hello World” using:
Effectively, we call the function print with the argument Hello World . All other functions in Python are called such that the argument is enclosed in parentheses, i.e.
This is the new convention required in Python 3 (and allowed for recent version of Python 2.x.)
Everything we have learned about formatting strings using the percentage operator still works the same way:
Как работает функция print в Python
Функция print() в Python используется для вывода текстовой информации на экран или в консоль. Эта функция может принимать один или несколько аргументов. Одним из обязательных аргументов является строка или объект, который будет выведен.
Вы наверняка знакомы с этой функцией. С неё начинается любой урок по программированию на Python.
В данном случае функция выведет в консоль сообщение:
При этом обязательно использовать скобки, иначе возникнет синтаксическая ошибка. В Python 2 скобки можно было не указывать, но в Python 3 скобки необходимы. Всё потому, что в третьей версии print() — это функция, а не инструкция.
Убедимся, что перед нами действительно функция, и спросим Python:
Python ответит нам, что перед нами встроенная функция или метод.
Аргументы print() в Python
Аргументы функции print() позволяют изменять способ форматирования сообщений и управлять стилем вывода.
Вот полный синтаксис функции, скрытый от наших глаз:
Аргументы функции здесь — это sep , end , file и flush :
- sep позволяет задать разделитель, который будет выводиться между элементами, переданными в функцию print(). По умолчанию разделителем является пробел, но с помощью sep пробел можно заменить на другой разделитель, к примеру, на запятую.
- end позволяет определять символ, который будет добавлен в конец сообщения после вывода. По умолчанию это символ перевода строки. Поменять его можно, к примеру, на точку с запятой.
- file позволяет перенаправить вывод текста в нужный вам файл. По умолчанию функция выводит текст в консоль, в которой вы и задаёте команды Python. Аргумент file полезен, если нужно сохранить вывод для дальнейшего использования.
- flush позволяет управлять буферизацией вывода. Если этот аргумент установлен в True, то вывод не будет буферизоваться и будет выводиться немедленно.
Рассмотрим эти аргументы чуть подробнее.
Аргумент sep в функции print() на Python
Как мы уже поняли, sep отвечает за то, какой символ будет отделять друг от друга элементы вывода. По умолчанию, если sep не поменять, этот символ будет пробелом.
Попросим Python вывести на экран слова, не меняя при этом sep .
Убеждаемся, что sep по умолчанию — это пробел. На экране появится такое сообщение:
Теперь попробуем заменить дефолтный пробел в sep на что-то другое. Используем символы \n в качестве разделителя в аргументе sep . Они должны перенести каждый следующий элемент выдачи на новую строку.
Получается вот такой вывод функции:
Как и ожидалось, после каждого слова в выводе строка переносится, ведь разделителем мы назначили именно перенос строки. ��
Аргумент end в функции print() на Python
Аргумент end — это суть то же самое, что и sep . Разница только в том, что sep — это разделитесь между элементами вывода, а end — это разделитесь самих выводов разных функций print() , если их несколько.
По умолчанию end — это перенос строки. Его тоже можно заменить на любое другое удобное значение.
Вот, как выглядит стандартный вывод функций print() , если не менять аргумент end .
Попробуем заменить перенос строки в аргументе end на обычный пробел.
Вывод с обычным пробелом вместо переноса строки:
Аргумент file в функции print() на Python
Аргумент file позволяет записывать данные вывода в файлы с расширением txt или csv.
По умолчанию значение аргумента file указано как sys.stdout . Это — вывод значений непосредственно в консоль Python.
Допустим, нам нужно, чтобы по завершении программа записала вывод в файлик print.txt. Для этого напишем простую программу, которая:
- откроет файл print.txt;
- запишет данные вывода в файл;
- закроет файл print.txt.
Результатом выполнения этого кода станет появление файла print.txt. Внутри него должно оказаться:
Аргумент flush в функции print() на Python
Аргумент flush в функции print() в Python позволяет управлять выводом сообщений без задержек.
Дело в том, что по умолчанию программа будет записывать данные вывода из print() сперва в буфер обмена, а уже потом выводить данные в консоль или в файл.
По умолчанию аргумент flush установлен в значении False .
Когда значение аргумента flush установлено в True , Python выводит сообщение, не дожидаясь буферизации вывода. Это полезно, когда нужно мгновенно показать вывод в консоли или в файле.
В этом примере мы записали вывод Hello, world! в файл output.txt без буферизации, установив значение аргумента flush как True .
Однако с этим аргументом нужно быть осторожным:
- Если возникнет ошибка в выполнении программы, а аргумент flush установлен как True, результат вывода может быть утерян. Он не сохранится в буфере из-за значения True и не отобразится в консоли или в файле из-за ошибки.
- Использование flush=True при работе с несколькими потоками может привести к тому, что разные потоки будут пытаться выводить данные в поток вывода одновременно. Это приведет к ошибкам.
Использование flush=True без должной осторожности может создать проблемы в работе программы и усложнить отладку. Если нет необходимости в ручной записи данных в поток вывода, лучше не использовать этот параметр.
В общем, аргументы функции print() позволяют управлять тем, как сообщения выводятся на экран и в консоль, и как они форматируются и выводятся. Это делает print() очень универсальной функцией, которую можно использовать во многих различных ситуациях.