Question

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex6.html

Zed seems to use %r and %s interchangeably here, is there any difference between the two? Why not just use %s all the time?

Also, I wasn’t sure what to search for in the documentation to find more info on this. What are %r and %s called exactly? Formatting strings?

Answer 1

They are called string formatting operations.

The difference between %s and %r is that %s uses the str function and %r uses the repr function. You can read about the differences between str and repr in this answer, but for built-in types, the biggest difference in practice is that repr for strings includes quotes and all special characters are escaped.