Question

Why this does not work?

[ print("%d03" % a) for a in range(1,99)]
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    [ print("%d03" % a) for a in range(1,99)]
          ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

but

print(“%03d” % a)
098

Answer 1

In Python 2.x, print is a statement, so it cannot appear as part of an expression. In Python 3.x, the list comprehension would be syntactically correct because print was turned into a function, though a bit pointless since print() always returns None.

In any case, this is the right way to do it:

for a in range(1,99):
    print("%d03" % a)