Question

I’ve come across lines like this in Python:

print "Let's talk about %s." % my_name

However, I’ve seen cases in Ruby where these two have equivalent output:

print "Let's talk about #{my_name}."

print "Let's talk about %s." % my_name"

Is there only one way to print the same line in Python?

Answer 1

In Python there are also several ways:

print "let's talk about this %s" % my_name
print "let's talk about this {:s}".format(my_name)
print "let's talk about this", my_name

all generate the same output. However, use of the .format method (available since Python v 2.6) is encouraged over the old-style % (To quote from the What’s New in 3.0: “…the % operator is still supported; it will be deprecated in Python 3.1 and removed from the language at some later time.“)

Lastly, as of Python v3.x print is a function, so all print statements require ().