Question

I am not sure why I am getting this error. I have read and tried different things, but it is not working.

def product():

    y, x= raw_input('Please enter two numbers: ')
    times = float(x) * int(y)
    print 'product is', times
product()

What am I doing wrong? Thank you so much

Answer 1

raw_input returns a single string. to unpack arguments as you’re doing, it would need to return 2 things.

You could do something like this:

y, x = raw_input('Please enter two numbers (separated by whitespace): ').split(None,1)

Note that this is still a little fragile because the user could input a string like “2 1 3”. The unpacking would work without an exception, but it would choke when trying to convert “1 3” to an integer. The most robust way to do these things is via a try/except block. Here’s how I would do it.

while True: #try to get 2 numbers forever.
   try:
      y, x = raw_input("2 numbers please (integer, float): ").split()
      y = int(y)
      x = float(x)
      break  #got 2 numbers, we can stop trying and do something useful with them.
   except ValueError:
      print "Oops, that wasn't an integer followed by a float.  Try again"