You have probablry used computers to do all sorts of useful and interesting things. In each application, the computer responds in different ways to your input, from the keyboard, mouse or a file. Still the underlying operations are determined by the design of the program you are given. In this set of tutorials you will learn to write your own computer programs, so you can give the computer instructions to react in the way you want.
First let us place Python programming in the context of the computer hardware. At the most fundamental level in the computer there are instructions built into the hardware. These are very simple instructions, peculiar to the hardware of your particular type of computer. The instructions are designed to be simple for the hardware to execute, not for humans to follow. The earliest programming was done with such instructions. If was difficult and error-prone. A major advance was the development of higher-level languages and translators for them. Higher-level languages allow computer programmers to write instructions in a format that is easier for humans to understand. For example
z = x+y
is an instruction in many high-level languages that means something like:
No computer understands the high-level instruction directly; it is not in machine language. A special program must first translate instructions like this one into machine language. This one high-level instruction might be translated into a sequence of three machine language instructions corresponding to the three step description above:
0000010010000001
0000000010000010
0000010110000011
Obviously high-level languages were a great advance in clarity!
If you follow a broad introduction to computing, you will learn more about the layers that connect low-level digital computer circuits to high-level languages.
There are many high-level languages. The language you will be learning is Python. Python is one of the easiest languages to learn and use, while at the same time being very powerful: It is used by many of the most highly productive professional programmers. A few of the places that use Python extensively are Google, the New York Stock Exchange, Industrial Light and Magic, .... Also Python is a free language! If you have your own computer, you can download it from the Internet....
If you are not sure whether your computer already has Python, continue to Section 1.2.2, and give it a try. If it works, you are all set.
If you do need a copy of Python, go to the Downloads page linked to http://www.python.org. Be careful to choose the version for your operating system and hardware. Chosse a stable version, 3.1 or later. Do not choose a version 2.X, which is incompatible. (Version 2.6 is described in an older version of this tutorial.)
You just need to execute the installer, and interact enough to agree to all the default choices. Python works in Windows as well as on Apples and in the free operating system Linux.
Double-click on the installer. Find and run the MacPython.mpkg that is inside. Follow the defaults for installation.
Python is generally installed, though Idle is not always installed. Look for something like 'idle-python' (the name in the Ubuntu distribution).
Although Python is a high-level language, it is not English or some other natural human language. The Python translator does not understand “add the numbers two and three”. Python is a formal language with its own specific rules and formats, which these tutorials will introduce gradually, at a pace intended for a beginner. These tutorials are also appropriate for beginners because they gradually introduce fundamental logical programming skills. Learning these skills will allow you to much more easily program in other languages besides Python. Some of the skills you will learn are
Guiding Principals for the Hands-on Python Tutorials:
Although this approach is an effective way to introduce material, it is not so good for reference. Referencing is addressed in several ways:
Some people learn better visually and verbally from the very beginning. Some parts of the tutorial will also have links to corresponding flash video segments. Many people will find reading faster and more effective, but the video segments may be particularly useful where a computer interface can be not only explained but actually demonstrated. The links to such segments will be labeled. They will need a broadband link or a CD (not yet generated).
In the Firefox browser, the incremental find is excellent, and particularly useful with the single web page version of the tutorials. (It only fails to search footnotes.) It is particularly easy to jump through different sections in a form like 1.2.4.
First you need to set up a location to store your work and the example programs from this tutorial. If you are on a Windows computer, follow just one of the three choices below to find an appropriate place to download the example archive examples.zip, and then follow the later instructions to unzip the archive.
In Windows, after you have chosen a location for the archive, examples.zip, download it by right clicking on http://cs.luc.edu/anh/python/hands-on/3.0/examples.zip and selecting “Save As” or the equivalent on your browser and then navigate to save the archive to the chosen location on your computer. Note the the examples, like this version of the tutorial, are for Python 3.1. There were major changes to Python in version 3.0, making it incompatible with earlier versions.
If you are using Python version 2.5 or 2.6, you should continue with the older version of the tutorial. Go to http://cs.luc.edu/~anh/python/hands-on and find the links to the proper version of the tutorial and examples.
Once you have the archive, open a file browser window for that directory, right click on examples.zip, select Extract All. This will create the folder examples. End up with a file browser window showing the contents of the examples folder. This will be your Python folder in later discussion.
Caution 1: On Windows, files in a zip archive can be viewed while they are still in the zip archive. Modifying and adding files is not so transparent. Be sure that you unzip the archive and work from the regular directory that holds the resulting unzipped files.
Caution 2: Make sure that all the directories leading down to your Python examples directory do not include any spaces in them. This will be important in Chapter 4 for the local webserver. In particular, that means you should not place your folder under “My Documents”. A directory like C:\hands-on or C:\python would be fine.
You also have the option of downloading
The disadvantage of a local copy is that the tutorial may be updated online after you get your download. The change log file http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh/python/hands-on/changelog.html will show when the latest update was made and a summary of any major changes.
This section assumes Python, version at least 3.1, is already on your computer. Windows does not come with Python. (To load Python see Section 1.1.2) On a Mac or Linux computer enough of Python comes installed to be able to run the sample program.
If you are in a Windows lab with Python 3.1 installed, but not set up as the default version, see the footnote.1
Before getting to the individual details of Python, you will run a simple text-based sample program. Find madlib.py in your Python folder (Section 1.2.1).
Options for running the program:
python madlib.py
The latter approach only works in a Windows command window if your operating system execution path is set up to find Python.
In whatever manner you start the program, run it, responding to the prompts on the screen. Be sure to press the enter key at the end of each response requested from you.
Try the program a second time and make different responses.
If you want to get right to the detailed explanations of writing your own Python, you can skip to the next section 1.2.4. If you would like an overview of a working program, even if all the explanations do not make total sense yet, read on.
Here is the text of the madlib.py program, followed by line-by-line brief explanations. Do not worry if you not totally understand the explanations! Try to get the gist now and the details later. The numbers on the right are not part of the program file. They are added for reference in the comments below.
""" 1
String Substitution for a Mad Lib 2
Adapted from code by Kirby Urner 3
""" 4
5
storyFormat = """ 6
Once upon a time, deep in an ancient jungle, 7
there lived a {animal}. This {animal} 8
liked to eat {food}, but the jungle had 9
very little {food} to offer. One day, an 10
explorer found the {animal} and discovered 11
it liked {food}. The explorer took the 12
{animal} back to {city}, where it could 13
eat as much {food} as it wanted. However, 14
the {animal} became homesick, so the 15
explorer brought it back to the jungle, 16
leaving a large supply of {food}. 17
18
The End 19
""" 20
21
def tellStory(): 22
userPicks = dict() 23
addPick('animal', userPicks) 24
addPick('food', userPicks) 25
addPick('city', userPicks) 26
story = storyFormat.format(**userPicks) 27
print(story) 28
29
def addPick(cue, dictionary): 30
'''Prompt for a user response using the cue string, 31
and place the cue-response pair in the dictionary. 32
''' 33
prompt = 'Enter an example for ' + cue + ': ' 34
response = input(prompt) 35
dictionary[cue] = response 36
37
tellStory() 38
input("Press Enter to end the program.") 39
Line By Line Explanation
""" 1
String Substitution for a Mad Lib 2
Adapted from code by Kirby Urner 3
""" 4
There is multi-line text enclosed in triple quotes. Quoted text is called a string. A string at the very beginning of a file like this is documentation for the file.
Blank lines are included for human readability to separate logical parts. The computer ignores the blank lines.
storyFormat = """ 6
Once upon a time, deep in an ancient jungle, 7
there lived a {animal}. This {animal} 8
liked to eat {food}, but the jungle had 9
very little {food} to offer. One day, an 10
explorer found the {animal} and discovered 11
it liked {food}. The explorer took the 12
{animal} back to {city}, where it could 13
eat as much {food} as it wanted. However, 14
the {animal} became homesick, so the 15
explorer brought it back to the jungle, 16
leaving a large supply of {food}. 17
18
The End 19
""" 20
The equal sign tells the computer that this is an assignment statement. The computer will now associate the value of the expression between the triple quotes, a multi-line string, with the name on the left, storyFormat.
These lines contain the body of the string and the ending triple quotes. This storyFormat string contains some special symbols making it a format string, unlike the string in lines 1-4. The storyFormat string will be used later to provide a format into which substitutions are made. The parts of the string enclosed in braces are places a substitute string will be inserted later. The substituted string will come from a custom dictionary that will contain the user's definitions of these words. The words in the braces: {animal}, {food}, {city}, indicate that "animal", "food", and "city" are words in a dictionary. This custom dictionary will be created in the program and contain the user's definitions of these words. These user's definitions will be substituted later in the format string where each {...} is currently.
def tellStory(): 22
userPicks = dict() 23
addPick('animal', userPicks) 24
addPick('food', userPicks) 25
addPick('city', userPicks) 26
story = storyFormat.format(**userPicks) 27
print(story) 28
def is short for def inition. This line is the heading of a def inition, which makes the name tellStory becomes def ined as a short way to refer to the sequence of statements that start indented on line 23, and continue through line 27.
The equal sign tells the computer that this is another assignment statement. The computer will now associate the name userPicks with a new empty dictionary created by the Python code dict().
addPick is the name for a sequence of instructions defined on lines 29-31 for adding another definition to a dictionary, based on the user's input. The result of these three lines is to add definitions for each of the three words 'animal', 'food', and 'city' to the dictionary called userPicks.
Assign the name story to a string formed by substituting into storyFormat using definitions from the dictionary userPicks, to give the user's customized story.
This is where all the work becomes visible: Print the story string to the screen.
def addPick(cue, dictionary): 30
'''Prompt for a user response using the cue string, 31
and place the cue-response pair in the dictionary. 32
''' 33
prompt = 'Enter an example for ' + cue + ': ' 34
response = input(prompt) 35
dictionary[cue] = response 36
This line is the heading of a definition, which gives the name addPick as a short way to refer to the sequence of statements indented on line 34-36. The name addPick is followed by two words in parenthesis, cue and dictionary. These two words are associated with an actual cue word and dictionary given when this definition is invoked in lines 24-26.
A documentation comment for the addPick definition.
The plus sign here is used to concatenate parts of the string assigned to the name prompt. The current value of cue is placed into the string.
The right-hand-side of this equal sign causes an interaction with the user. The prompt string is printed to the computer screen, and the computer waits for the user to enter a line of text. That line of text then becomes a string inside the program. This string is assigned to the name response.
The left-hand-side of the equal sign is a reference to the definition of the cue word in the dictionary. The whole line ends up making the definition of the current cue word become the response typed by the user.
tellStory() 38
input("Press Enter to end the program.") 39
The definition of tellStory above does not make the computer do anything besides remember what the instruction tellStory means. It is only in this line, with the name, tellStory, followed by parentheses, that the whole sequence of remembered instructions are actually carried out.
This line is only here to accommodate running the program in Windows by double clicking on its file icon. Without this line, the story would be displayed and then the program would end, and Windows would make it immediately disappear from the screen! This line forces the program to continue being displayed until there is another response from the user, and meanwhile the user may look at the output from tellStory.
The program that translates Python instructions and then executes them is the Python interpreter.
This interpreter is embedded in a number of larger programs that make it particularly easy to develop Python programs. Such a programming environment is Idle, and it is a part of the standard distribution of Python.
Read the section that follows for your operating system:
(Assuming you already have Python installed.) Display your Python folder. You should see icon for Idle31Shortcut (and maybe a similar icon with a number larger than 31 - ignore any other unless you know you are using that version of Python). Double click on the appropriate shortcut, and an Idle window should appear. After this the instructions are the same in any operating environment. It is important to start Idle through these in several circumstances. It is best if it you make it a habit to use this shortcut. For example the alternative of opening an existing Python program in Windows XP or Vista from Open With Idle in the context menu looks like it works at first but then fails miserably but inexplicably when you try to run a graphics program.
the new version of Python and Idle should be in a folder called MacPython 3.1, inside the Applications folder. It is best if you can open a terminal window, change into your Python folder from Section 1.2.1, and enter the command
idle
If the command is not recognized, you may need to include the full path to the idle program.
The approach depends on the installation. In Ubuntu, you should fine idle in the Programming section of the Applications menu. As with OS X above, you are better starting idle from a terminal, with the current directory being your Python folder.
Idle has several parts you may choose to display, each with its own window. Depending on the configuration, Idle can start up showing either of two windows, an Edit Window or a Python Shell Window. You are likely to first see an Edit window, whose top left corner looks something like in Windows:
For more on the Edit Window, see Section1.9.
If you see this Edit Window with its Run menu on top, go to the Run menu and choose PYTHON SHELL to open a Python Shell Window for now. Then you may close the Edit Window.
Either initially, or after explicitly opening it, you should now see the Python Shell window, with a menu like the following, though the text may be slightly different:
Look at the Python Shell. ...
In the Shell the last line should look like
>>>
The >>> is the prompt, telling you Idle is waiting for you to type something. Continuing on the same line enter
6+3
Be sure to end with the Enter key. After the Shell responds, you should see something like
>>> 6+3
9
>>>
The shell evaluates the line you entered, and prints the result. You see Python does arithmetic. At the end you see a further prompt >>> where you can enter your next line.... The result line, showing 9, that is produced by the computer, does not start with “> > >”.
Python directly recognizes a variety of types of data. Here are a few:
3, 6, -7, 1.25
'hello', 'The answer is: '
[1, 2, 3, 4], ['yes', 'no', 'maybe']
None
Python has large collection of built-in functions that operate on different kinds of data to produce all kinds of results. To make a function do its action, parentheses are required. These parentheses surround the parameter or parameters, as in a function in algebra class.
The general syntax to execute a function is
functionName ( parameters )
One function is called type, and it returns the type of any object. The Python Shell will evaluate functions. In the Shell the last line should look like
>>>
Continuing on the same line enter
type(7)
Always remember to end with the Enter key. After the Shell responds, you should see something like
>>> type(7)
<class 'int'>
>>>
In the result, int is short for integer. The work class is basically a synonym for type in Python. At the end you see a further prompt where you can enter your next line....
For the rest of this section, at the >>> prompt in the Python Shell, individually enter each line below that is set off in typewriter font. So next enter
type(1.25)
Note the name in the last result is float, not real or decimal, coming from the term “floating point”, for reasons that will be explained later, in Section 1.14.1. Enter
type('hello')
In your last result you see another abbreviation: str rather than string. Enter
type([1, 2, 3])
Strings and lists are both sequences of parts (characters or elements). We can find the length of that sequence with another function with the abbreviated name len. Try both of the following, separately, in the Shell:
len([2, 4, 6])
len('abcd')
Some functions have no parameters, so nothing goes between the parentheses. For example, some types serve as no-parameter functions to create a simple value of their type. Try
list()
You see the way an empty list is displayed.
Functions may also take more than one parameter. Try
max(5, 11, 2)
Above, max is short for maximum.
Some of the names of types serve as conversion functions (where there is an obvious meaning for the conversion). Try each of the following, one at a time, in the Shell:
str(23)
int('125')
An often handy Shell feature: an earlier Shell line may to copied and edited by clicking anywhere in the previously displayed line and then pressing Enter. For instance you should have entered several lines starting with len. click on any one, press Enter, and edit the line for a different test.
We start with the integers and integer arithmetic, not because arithmetic is exciting, but because the symbolism should be mostly familiar. Of course arithmetic is important in many cases, but Python is probably more often used to manipulate text and other sorts of data, as in the sample program in Section 1.2.2.
Python understands numbers and standard arithmetic. For the whole section on integer arithmetic, where you see a set-off line in typewriter font, type individual lines at the > > > prompt in the Python Shell. Press Enter after each line to get Python to respond:
77
2 + 3
5 - 7
Python should evaluate and print back the value of each expression. Of course the first one does not require any calculation. It appears the shell just echoes back what you printed. Do note that the line with the value produced by the shell does not start with > > > and appears at the left margin. Hence you can distinguish what you type (after the “> > >” prompt) from what the computer responds.
The Python Shell is an interactive interpreter. As you can see, after you press Enter, it is evaluating the expression you typed in, and then printing the result automatically. This is a very handy environment to check out simple Python syntax and get instant feedback. For more elaborate programs that you want to save, we will switch to an Editor Window later.
Try in the Shell:
2 x 3
You should get your first syntax error. The 'x' should have become highlighted, indicating the location where the Python interpreter discovered that it cannot understand you: Python does not use x for multiplication as you may have done in grade school. The x can be confused with the use of x as a variable (more on that later). Instead the symbol for multiplication is an asterisk '*'. Enter each of the following. You may include spaces or not. The Python interpreter can figure out what you mean either way. Try in the Shell:
2*5
2 + 3 * 4
If you expected the last answer to be 20, think again: Python uses the normal precedence of arithmetic operations: Multiplications and divisions are done before addition and subtraction, unless there are parentheses. Try
(2+3)*4
2 * (4 - 1)
Now try the following in the Shell, exactly as written, followed by Enter, with no closing parenthesis:
5 * (2 + 3
Look carefully. There is no answer given at the left margin of the next line and no prompt > > > to start a new expression. If you are using Idle, the cursor has gone to the next line and has only indented slightly. Python is waiting for you to finish your expression. It is smart enough to know that opening parentheses are always followed by the same number of closing parentheses. The cursor is on a continuation line. Type just the matching close-parenthesis and Enter,
)
and you should finally see the expression evaluated. (In some versions of the Python interpreter, the interpreter puts '...' at the beginning of a continuation line, rather than just indenting.)
Negation also works. Try in the Shell:
-(2 + 3)
If you think about it, you learned several ways to do division. Eventually you learned how to do division resulting is a decimal. Try in the Shell:
5/2
14/4
As you saw in the previous section, numbers with decimal points in them are of type float in Python. They are discussed more in Section 1.14.1.
In the earliest grades you would say “14 divided by 4 is 3 with a remainder of 2”. The problem here is that the answer is in two parts, the integer quotient 3 and the remainder 2, and neither of these results is the same as the decimal result. Python has separate operations to generate each part. Python uses the doubled division symbol // for the operation that produces just the integer quotient, and introduces the symbol % for the operation of finding the remainder. Try each in the Shell
14/4
14//4
14%4
Now predict and then try each of
23//5
23%5
20%5
6//8
6%8
Finding remainders will prove more useful than you might think in the future!
Enough with numbers for a while. Strings of characters are another important type in Python.
A string in Python is a sequence of characters. For Python to recognize a sequence of characters, like hello, as a string, it must be enclosed in quotes to delimit the string.
For this whole section on strings, continue trying each set-off line of code in the Shell. Try
"hello"
Note that the interpreter gives back the string with single quotes. Python does not care what system you use. Try
'Hi!'
Having the choice of delimiters can be handy.
Exercise 1.5.1.1. * Figure out how to give Python the string containing the text: I'm happy. Try it. If you got an error, try it with another type of quotes, and figure out why that one works and not the first.
There are many variations on delimiting strings and embedding special symbols. We will consider more ways later in Section 1.8.
A string can have any number of characters in it, including 0. The empty string is '' (two quote characters with nothing between them).
Strings are a new Python type. Try
type('dog')
type('7')
type(7)
The last two lines show how easily you can get confused! Strings can include any characters, including digits. Quotes turn even digits into strings. This will have consequences in the next section....
Strings also have operation symbols. Try in the Shell (noting the space after very):
'very ' + 'hot'
The plus operation with strings means concatenate the strings. Python looks at the type of operands before deciding what operation is associated with the +.
Think of the relation of addition and multiplication of integers, and then guess the meaning of
3*'very ' + 'hot'
Were you right? The ability to repeat yourself easily can be handy.
Exercise 1.5.2.1. * Figure out a compact way to get Python to make the string, “YesYesYesYesYes”, and try it. How about “MaybeMaybeMaybeYesYesYesYesYes” ? Hint: 2
Predict the following and then test. Remember the last section on types:
7+2
'7'+'2'
Python checks the types and interprets the plus symbol based on the type. Try
'7'+2
With mixed string and int types, Python sees an ambiguous expression, and does not guess which you want – it just gives an error! 3
Each set-off line in this section should be tried in the Shell.
Try
width = 10
Nothing is displayed by the interpreter after this entry, so it is not clear anything happened. Something has happened. This is an assignment statement, with a variable, width, on the left. A variable is a name for a value. An assignment statement associates a variable name on the left of the equal sign with the value of an expression calculated from the right of the equal sign. Enter
width
Once a variable is assigned a value, the variable can be used in place of that value. The response to the expression width is the same as if its value had been entered.
The interpreter does not print a value after an assignment statement because the value of the expression on the right is not lost. It can be recovered if you like, by entering the variable name and we did above.
Try each of the following lines:
height = 12
area = width * height
area
The equal sign is an unfortunate choice of symbol for assignment, since Python's usage is not the mathematical usage of the equal sign. If the symbol ← had appeared on keyboards in the early 1990's, it would probably have been used for assignment instead of =, emphasizing the asymmetry of assignment. In mathematics an equation is an assertion that both sides of the equal sign are already, in fact, equal. A Python assignment statement forces the variable on the left hand side to become associated with the value of the expression on the right side. The difference from the mathematical usage can be illustrated. Try:
10 = width
so this is not equivalent in Python to width = 10. The left hand side must be a variable, to which the assignment is made. Try
width = width + 5
This is, of course, nonsensical as mathematics, but it makes perfectly good sense as an assignment, with the right-hand side calculated first. Can you figure out the value that is now associated with width? Check by entering
width
In the assignment statement, the expression on the right is evaluated first. At that point width was associated with its original value 10, so width + 5 had the value of 10 + 5 which is 15. That value was then assigned to the variable on the left (width again) to give it a new value. We will modify the value of variables in a similar way routinely.
Assignment and variables work equally well with strings. Try:
first = 'Sue'
last = 'Wong'
name = first + ' ' + last
name
Try entering:
first = fred
Note the different form of the error message. The earlier errors in these tutorials were syntax errors: errors in translation of the instruction. In this last case the syntax was legal, so the interpreter went on to execute the instruction. Only then did it find the error described. There are no quotes around fred, so the interpreter assumed fred was an identifier, but the name fred was not defined at the time the line was executed.
It is easy to forget quotes where you need them and put them around a variable name that should not have them!
Try in the Shell:
fred = 'Frederick'
first = fred
first
Now fred, without the quotes, makes sense.
There are more subtleties to assignment and the idea of a variable being a “name for” a value, but we will worry about them later, in Section 2.4.6. They do not come up if our variables are just numbers and strings.
Autocompletion: A handy short cut. Python remembers all the variables you have defined at any moment. This is handy when editing. Without pressing Enter, type into the Shell just
f
Then hold down the Alt key and press the '/' key. This key combination is abbreviated Alt-/. You should see f autocompleted to be first. This is particularly useful if you have long identifiers! You can press Alt-/ several times if more than one identifier starts with the initial sequence of characters you typed. If you press Alt-/ again you should see fred. Backspace and edit so you have fi, and then and press Alt-/ again. You should not see fred this time, since it does not start with fi.
Expressions like 27 or 'hello' are called literals, coming from the fact that they literally mean exactly what they say. They are distinguished from variables, who value is not directly determined by their name.
The sequence of characters used to form a variable name (and names for other Python entities later) is called an identifier. It identifies a Python variable or other entity.
There are some restrictions on the character sequence that make up an identifier:
False class finally is return
None continue for lambda try
True def from nonlocal while
and del global not with
as elif if or yield
assert else import pass
break except in raise
There are also identifiers that are automatically defined in Python, and that you could redefine, but you probably should not unless you really know what you are doing! When you start the editor, we will see how Idle uses color to help you know what identifies are predefined.
Python is case sensitive: The identifiers last, LAST, and LaSt are all different. Be sure to be consistent. Using the Alt-/ auto-completion shortcut in Idle helps ensure you are consistent.
What is legal is distinct from what is conventional or good practice or recommended. Meaningful names for variables are important for the humans who are looking at programs, understanding them, and revising them. That sometimes means you would like to use a name that is more than one word long, like price at opening, but blanks are illegal! One poor option is just leaving out the blanks, like priceatopening. Then it may be hard to figure out where words split. Two practical options are
Use the choice that fits your taste (or the taste or convention of the people you are working with).
In interactive use of the Python interpreter, you can type an expression and immediately see the result of its evaluation. This is fine to test out syntax and maybe do simple calculator calculations. In a program run from a file like the first sample program, Python does not display expressions this way. If you want your program to display something, you can give explicit instructions with the print function. Try in the Shell:
x = 3
y = 5
print('The sum of', x, 'plus', y, 'is', x+y)
The print function will prints as strings everything in a comma-separated sequence of expressions, and it will separate the results with single blanks by default. Note that you can mix types: anything that is not already a string is automatically converted to its string representation.
You can also use it with no parameters:
print()
to just advance to the next line.
Strings delimited by one quote character are required to lie within a single Python line. It is sometimes convenient to have a multi-line string, which can be delimited with triple quotes: Try typing the following. You will get continuation lines until the closing triple quotes. Try in the Shell:
sillyTest = '''Say,
"I'm in!"
This is line 3'''
print(sillyTest)
The line structure is preserved in a multi-line string. As you can see, this also allows you to embed both single and double quote characters!
Continuing in the Shell with sillyTest, enter just
sillyTest
The answer looks strange! It indicates an alternate way to encode the string internally in Python using escape codes. Escape codes are embedded inside string literals and start with a backslash character (\). They are used to embed characters that are either unprintable or have a special syntactic meaning to Python that you want to suppress. In this example you see the most common ones:
| Escape code | Meaning |
| \' | ' |
| \n | newline |
| \\ | \ |
The newline character indicates further text will appear on a new line when printed. When you use a print function, you get the actual printed meaning of the escaped coded character.
Predict the result, and try in the Shell:
print('a\nb\n\nc')
Did you guess the right number of lines splitting in the right places?
It is time to put longer collections of instructions together. That is most easily done by creating a text file and running the Python interpreter on the file. Idle simplifies that process.
First you can put an existing file into an Idle Edit Window. Click on the Idle File menu and select Open. (Or as you see, you can use the shortcut Ctrl+O. That means holding down the Ctrl key, and pressing the letter O for Open.) You should get a file selection dialog. You should have the sample program madlib.py displayed in the list. Select it and open it. (If you do not see the program, then you either failed to download the example programs, Section 1.2.1, or you did not start Idle in the proper folder, Section 1.2.4.)
You will see the source code again. Now run this program from inside of Idle: Go to the Run menu of that Edit window, and select Run Module. Notice the shortcut (F5).
If the Shell window does not automatically come to the foreground, select it. You should see a line saying “RESTART” and then the start of the execution of the Mad Lib program with the cursor waiting for your entry after the first prompt. Finish executing the program. Be sure to type the final requested Enter, so you get back to the interpreter prompt: > > >
Look at the editor window again. You should see that different parts of the code have different colors. String literals are likely green. The reserved words def are likely orange. Look at the last two lines, where the identifier tellStory is black, and the identifier input is likely purple. Only identifiers that are not predefined by Python are black. If you create an identifier name, make sure Idle shows it in black.
When you execute a program from the Idle Editor, the interpreter gives a banner saying “RESTART”, meaning that all the things you defined in any shell session so far are wiped clean and the program you are running starts fresh. There is one egregious exception to that, that was still present at least in the version of Idle for Python 3.1 in Windows. We will try to demonstrate the bug. (A bug is an error in a program.)
Start running the Mad Lib program again by going to the Editor Window containing madlib.py, and start running the program again, but do not continue....
You should see a prompt for user input generated by the program. Ignore this prompt and go back to the Edit Window and start the Mad Lib program again.
If this bug is still present, you should see a difference in this restart: This time after the RESTART banner and the interpreter prompt: > > >, which looks innocent enough, but this program should show the program's prompt string for input.
The problem only comes up because you interrupted the last execution when user input was being waited for. The restart was not complete here: The system is still looking for the pending user input from the last execution.
The fix is simple: Make sure the Interpreter Window is the currently selected window, and press return to terminate the lost user input. In some circumstances, you may need to press return a second time.
After that the program should start up normally with its prompt.
Watch out for this behavior, and remember the fix.
Make sure you have Idle started in your Python directory (in Windows with the provided Idle shortcut link), where you will store program files. (Do not start Idle from the Windows Start Menu!) If you just started Idle now, you may already have a blank Edit Window in front of you. If not, open a new window by going to the File menu and selecting New Window. This gives you a rather conventional text editing window with the mouse available, ability to cut and paste, plus a few special options for Python.
Type (or paste) the following into the editor window:
print('Hello world!')
Save the file with the File menu -> Save, and then enter the file name hello.py. Python program files should always be given a name ending in ".py", and you must enter the .py extension explicitly .
If you look in the editor, you should see that your text is color coded. The editor will color different parts of Python syntax in special colors. (In version 2.4 of Python, the coloring only happens after you save your file with the '.py' ending.)
Now that you have a complete, saved program, choose Run menu -> Run Module. You should see the program run in the Python Shell window.
You just wrote and executed a program. Unlike when you use the shell, this code is saved to a file in your Python folder. You can open and execute the file any time you want. (In Idle, use File->Open.)
To the interpreter, a program source file corresponds to a Python module. We will tend to use the more general term: a program file is a module. Note the term from the menu when running the program.
Distinguish program code from Shell text: It is easy to confuse the Shell and the Edit windows. Make sure you keep them straight. The hello.py program is just the line
print('Hello world!')
that you typed into the edit window and saved. When you ran the program in Idle, you saw results in the Shell. First came the Restart notice, the one-line output from the program saying hello, and a further Shell prompt:
>>> ================================ RESTART ========
>>>
Hello world!
>>>
You could also have typed this single printing line directly in the Shell in response to a Shell prompt. When you see >>>, you could enter the print function and get the exchange between you and the Shell:
>>> print('Hello world')
Hello world!
>>>
The three lines above are not a program you could save in a file and run. This is just an exchange in the Shell, with its >>> prompts, individual line to execute and the response. Again, just the single line, with no >>>,
print('Hello world!')
entered into the Edit window forms a program you can save and run. We will shortly get to more interesting many-statement programs, where it is much more convenient to use the Edit window than the Shell!
The program above is self evident, and shows how short and direct a program can be (unlike other languages like Java). Still, right away, get used to documenting a program. Python has a special feature: If the beginning of a program is just a quoted string, that string is taken to be the program's documentation string. Open the example file hello2.py in the Edit window:
'''A very simple program,
showing how short a Python program can be!
Authors: ___, ___
'''
print('Hello world!') #This is a stupid comment after the # mark
Most commonly, the initial documentation goes on for several lines, so a multi-line string delimiter is used (the triple quotes). Just for completeness of illustration in this program, another form of comment is also shown, a comment that starts with the symbol # and extends to the end of the line. The Python interpreter completely ignores this form of comment. Such a comment should only be included for better human understanding. Avoid making comments that do not really aid human understanding. (Do what I say, not what I did above.) Good introductory comment strings and appropriate names for the parts of your programs make fewer # symbol comments needed.
Run the program and see the documentation and comment make no difference in the result.
Of course you can arrange the windows on your computer screen any way that you like. A suggestion as you start to use the combination of the editor to write, the shell to run, and the tutorial to follow along: Make all three mostly visible your computer screen at once. Drag the editor window to the upper left. Place the Shell window to the lower left, and perhaps reduce its height a bit so there is not much overlap. If you are looking at the web version of the tutorial on the screen, make it go top to bottom on the right, but not overlap the Idle windows too much. The web page rendering should generally adapt to the width pretty well. You can always temporarily maximize the window. Before resizing the browser window, it is good to look for an unusual phrase on your page, and search for it after resizing, since resizing can totally mess up your location in the web page.
There is an alternative to maximization for the Idle editor window: It you want it to go top to bottom of the screen but not widen, you can toggle that state with Alt-2. Play with all this.
The hello program of Section 1.9.3 always does the same thing. This is not very interesting. Programs are only going to be reused if they can act on a variety of data. One way to get data is directly from the user. Modify the hello.py program as follows in the editor, and save it from the File menu with Save As...., using the name hello_you.py.
person = input('Enter your name: ')
print('Hello', person)
Run the program. In the Shell you should see
Enter your name:
Follow the instruction (and press Enter). Make sure the typing cursor is in the Shell window, at the end of this line. After you type your response, you can see that the program has taken in the line you typed. That is what the built-in function input does: First it prints the string you give as a parameter (in this case 'Enter your name: '), and then it waits for a line to be typed in, and returns the string of characters you typed. In the hello_you.py program this value is assigned to the variable person, for use later.
The parameter inside the parentheses after input is important. It is a prompt, prompting you that keyboard input is expected at that point, and hopefully indicating what is being requested. Without the prompt, the user would not know what was happening, and the computer would just sit there waiting!
Open the example program, interview.py. Before running it (with any made-up data), see if you can figure out what it will do:
'''Illustrate input and print.'''
applicant = input("Enter the applicant's name: ")
interviewer = input("Enter the interviewer's name: ")
time = input("Enter the appointment time: ")
print(interviewer, "will interview", applicant, "at", time)
The statements are executed in the order they appear in the text of the program: sequentially. This is the simplest way for the execution of the program to flow. You will see instructions later that alter that natural flow.
If we want to reload and modify the hello_you.py program to put an exclamation point at the end, you could try:
person = input('Enter your name: ')
print('Hello', person, '!')
Run it and you see that it is not spaced right. There should be no space after the person's name, but the default behavior of the print function is to have each field printed separated by a space. There are several ways to fix this. You should know one. Think about it before going on to the next section. Hint: 4
One way to put punctuation but no space after the person in hello_you.py is to use the plus operator, +. Another approach is to change the default separatpr between fields in the print function. This will introduce a new syntax feature, keyword parameters. The print function has a keyword parameter named sep. If you leave it out of a call to print, as we have so far, it is set equal to a space by default. If you add a final field, sep=”, in the print function in hello_you.py, you get the following example file, hello_you2.py:
person = input('Enter your name: ')
print('Hello ', person, '!', sep='')
Try the program.
Keyword paramaters must be listed at the end of the parameter list.
Consider the following problem: Prompt the user for two numbers, and then print out a sentence stating the sum. For instance if the user entered 2 and 3, you would print “The sum of 2 and 3 is 5.”
You might imagine a solution like the example file addition1.py, shown below. There is a problem. Can you figure it out before you try it? Hint: 5 End up running it in any case.
x = input("Enter an integer: ")
y = input("Enter another integer: ")
print('The sum of ', x, ' and ', y, ' is ', x+y, '.', sep='') # error!
We do not want string concatenation, but integer addition. We need integer operands. Briefly mentioned in Section 1.3 was the fact that we can use type names as functions to convert types. One approach would be to do that. Further variable names are also introduced in the example addition2.py file below to emphasize the distinctions in types. Read and run:
'''Conversion of strings to int before addition'''
xString = input("Enter an integer: ")
x = int(xString)
yString = input("Enter another integer: ")
y = int(yString)
print('The sum of ', x, ' and ', y, ' is ', x+y, '.', sep='')
Needing ito convert string input to numbersis a common situation, both with keyboard input and later in web pages. While the extra variables above emphasized the steps, it is more concise to write as in the variation in example file, addition3.py, doing the conversons to type int immediately:
'''Two numeric inputs'''
x = int(input("Enter an integer: "))
y = int(input("Enter another integer: "))
print('The sum of ', x, ' and ', y, ' is ', x+y, '.', sep='')
The simple programs so far have followed a basic programming pattern: input-calculate-output. Get all the data first, calculate with it second, and output the results last. The pattern sequence would be even clearer if we explicitly create a named result variable in the middle, as in addition4.py:
x = int(input("Enter an integer: "))
y = int(input("Enter another integer: "))
sum = x + y
print('The sum of ', x, ' and ', y, ' is ', sum, '.', sep='')
We will see more complicated patterns, which involve repetition, in the future.
Exercise 1.10.3.1. * Write a version, add3.py, that asks for three numbers, and lists all three, and their sum, in similar format to the example above.
Exercise 1.10.3.2. * a. Write a program, quotient.py, that prompts the user for two integers, and then prints them out in a sentence with an integer division problem like "The quotient of 14 and 3 is 4 with a remainder of 2". Review Section 1.4.3 if you forget the integer division or remainder operator.
A common convention is fill-in-the blanks. For instance,
Hello _____!
and you can fill in the name of the person greeted, and combine given text with a chosen insertion. Python has a similar construction, better called fill-in-the-braces. There is a particular operation on strings called format, that makes substitutions into places enclosed in braces. For instance the example file, hello_you3.py, creates and prints the same string as in hello_you2.py from the previous section:
person = input('Enter your name: ')
greeting = 'Hello {}!'.format(person)
print(greeting)
There are several new ideas here!.
First method calling syntax is used. You will see in this more detail at the beginning of the next chapter. Strings and other objects have a special syntax for functions, called methods, associated with the particular type of object. In particular str objects have a method called format. The syntax for methods has the object followed by a period followed by the method name, and further parameters in parentheses.
object.methodname(paramters)
In the example above, the object is the string 'Hello {}!'. The method is named format. There is one further parameter, person.
The string has a special form, with braces embedded. Places where braces are embedded are replaced by the value of an expression taken from the parameter list for the format method. There are many variations on the syntax between the braces. In this case we use the syntax where the first (and only) location in the string with braces has a substitution made from the first (and only) parameter
In the code above, this new string is assigned to the identifier greeting, and then the string is printed. The identifier greeting was introduced to break the operations into a clearer sequence of steps. Since the value of greeting is only referenced once, it can be eliminated with the more concise version:
person = input('Enter your name: ')
print('Hello {}!'.format(person))
Consider the interview program. Suppose we want to add a period at the end of the sentence (with no space before it). One approach would be to combine everything with plus signs. Another way is printing with keyword sep=''. Another approach is with string formating. Here the idea is to fill in the blanks in
_____ will interview _____ at _____.
There are multiple places to substiitute, and the format approach can be extended to multiple substitutions: Each place in the format string where there is '{}', the format operation will substitute the value of the next parameter in the format parameter list.
Run the example file interview2.py, and check that the results from all three methods match.
'''Compare different approaches to printing with embedded values.'''
applicant = input("Enter the applicant's name: ")
interviewer = input("Enter the interviewer's name: ")
time = input("Enter the appointment time: ")
print(interviewer + ' will interview ' + applicant + ' at ' + time +'.')
print(interviewer, ' will interview ', applicant, ' at ', time, '.', sep='')
print('{} will interview {} at {}.'.format(interviewer, applicant, time))
A technical point: Since braces have special meaning in a format string, there must be a special rule if you want braces to actually be included in the final formatted string. The rule is to double the braces: '{{' and '}}'. The example code formatBraces.py, shown below, makes setStr refer to the string 'The set is {5, 9}.'. The initial and final doubled braces in the format string generate literal braces in the formatted string:
a = 5
b = 9
formatStr = 'The set is {{{}, {}}}.'
setStr = formatStr.format(a, b)
print(setStr)
This kind of format string depends directly on the order of the parameters to the format method. There is another approach with a dictionary, that was used in the first sample program, and will be discussed more in Section 1.12.2 on dictionaries. The dictionary approach is probably the best in many cases, but the count-based approach is an easier start, particularly if the parameters are just used once, in order.
(Optional elaboration) Imagine the format parmaters numbered in order, starting from 0. In this case 0, 1, and 2. The number of the parameter position may be included inside the braces, so an alternative to the last line of interview2.py is (added in example file interview3.py):
print('{0} will interview {1} at {2}.'.format(interviewer, applicant, time))
This is more verbose than the previous version, with no obvious advantage. If you desire to use some of the parameters more than once, then the approach with the numerical identification with the parameters is useful. Every place the string includes '{0}', the format operation will substitute the value of the initial parameter in the list. Wherever '{1}' appears, the next format parameter will be substituted....
Predict the results of the example file arith.py shown below,and then check yourself by running it. In this case the numbers referring to the parameter positions are necessary. They are both repeated and used out of order:
'''Fancier format string example.'''
x = 20
y = 30
formatStr = '{0} + {1} = {2}; {0} * {1} = {3}.'
equations = formatStr.format(x, y, x+y, x*y)
print(equations)
Try the program.
Exercise 1.10.4.1. * Write a version of Exercise 1.10.3.1, add3f.py, that uses the string format method to construct the final string.
Exercise 1.10.4.2. * Write a version of Exercise 1.10.3.2, quotientformat.py, that uses the string format method to construct the final string.
When new Python syntax is introduced, the usual approach will be to give both specific examples and general templates. In general templates for Python syntax the typeface indicates the the category of each part:
| Typeface | Meaning |
| Typewriter font | Text to be written verbatim |
| Emphasized | A place where you can use an arbitrary identifier. The emphasized text attempts to be descriptive of the meaning of the identifier in the current context. |
| Normal text | A description of what goes in that position, without giving explicit syntax |
We will use these conventions shortly in the discussion of function syntax, and will continue to use the conventions throughout the tutorial.
If you know it is the birthday of a friend, Emily, you might tell those gathered with you to sing "Happy Birthday to Emily".
We can make Python display the song. Read, and run if you like, the example program birthday1.py:
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
You would probably not repeat the whole song to let others know what to sing. You would give a request to sing via a descriptive name like "Happy Birthday to Emily".
In Python we can also give a name like happyBirthdayEmily, and associate the name with whole song by using a function definition. We use the Python def keyword, short for define.
Read for now:
def happyBirthdayEmily():
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
There are several parts of the syntax for a function definition to notice:
The heading contains def, the name of the function, parentheses, and finally a colon.
def function_name():
The remaining lines form the function body and are indented by a consistent amount. (The exact amount is not important to the interpreter, though 2 or 4 spaces are common conventions.)
The whole definition does just that: defines the meaning of the name happyBirthdayEmily, but it does not do anything else yet – for example, the definition itself does not make anything be printed yet. This is our first example of altering the order of execution of statements from the normal sequential order. This is important: the statements in the function definition are not executed as Python first passes over the lines.
The code above is in example file birthday2.py. Load it in Idle and execute it from there. Nothing should happen visibly. This is just like defining a variable: Python just remembers the function definition for future reference. After Idle finished executing a program, however, its version of the Shell remembers function definitions from the program.
In the Idle Shell (not the editor), enter
happyBirthdayEmily
The result probably surprises you! When you give the Shell an identifier, it tells you its value. Above, without parentheses, it identifies the function code as the value (and gives a location in memory of the code). Now try the name in the Idle Shell with parentheses added:
happyBirthdayEmily()
The parentheses tell Python to execute the named function rather than just refer to the function. Python goes back and looks up the definition, and only then, executes the code inside the function definition. The term for this action is a function call or function invocation. Note, in the function call there is no def, but there is the function name followed by parentheses.
function_name()
In many cases we will use a feature of program execution in Idle: that after program execution is completed, the Idle Shell still remembers functions defined in the program. This is not true if you run a program by selecting it directly in the operating system. The general assumption in this Tutorial will be that programs are run in Idle and the Idle Shell is the Shell referred to. It will be explicitly stated when you should run a program directly from the operating system. (With most of the examples in the tutorial, running from the operating system is OK – the execution method will not actually matter.)
Look at the example program birthday3.py. See it just adds two more lines, not indented. Can you guess what it does? Try it:
def happyBirthdayEmily(): #1
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #2
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #3
print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.") #4
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #5
happyBirthdayEmily() #6
happyBirthdayEmily() #7
The execution sequence is different from the textual sequence:
Functions alter execution order in several ways: by statements not being executed as the definition is first read, and then when the function is called during execution, jumping to the function code, and back at the the end of the function execution.
If it also happens to be Andre's birthday, we might define a function happyBirthdayAndre, too. Think how to do that before going on ....
Here is example program birthday4.py where we add a function happyBirthdayAndre, and call them both. Guess what happens, and then try it:
def happyBirthdayEmily(): # same old function
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
def happyBirthdayAndre():
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear Andre.")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
happyBirthdayEmily()
happyBirthdayAndre()
Again, everything is definitions except the last two lines. They are the only lines executed directly. The calls to the functions happen to be in the same order as their definitions, but that is arbitrary. If the last two lines were swapped, the order of operations would change. Do swap the last two lines so they appear as below, and see what happens when you execute the program:
happyBirthdayAndre()
happyBirthdayEmily()
Functions that you write can also call other functions you write. It is a good convention to have the main action of a program be in a function for easy reference. The example program birthday5.py has the two Happy Birthday calls inside a final function, main. Do you see that this version accomplishes the same thing as the last version? Run it.
def happyBirthdayEmily(): #1
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #2
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #3
print("Happy Birthday, dear Emily.") #4
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #5
def happyBirthdayAndre(): #6
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #7
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #8
print("Happy Birthday, dear Andre.") #9
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #10
def main(): #11
happyBirthdayAndre() #12
happyBirthdayEmily() #13
main() #14
If we want the program to do anything automatically when it is runs, we need one line outside of definitions! The final line is the only one directly executed, and it calls the code in main, which in turn calls the code in the other two functions.
Detailed order of execution:
There is one practical difference from the previous version. After execution, if we want to give another round of Happy Birthday to both persons, we only need to enter one further call in the Shell to:
main()
As a simple example emphasizing the significance of a line being indented, guess what the the example file order.py does, and run it to check:
def f():
print('In function f')
print('When does this print?')
f()
Modify the file so the second print function is outdented like below. What should happen now? Try it:
def f():
print('In function f')
print('When does this print?')
f()
The lines indented inside the function definition are remembered first, and only executed when the function f is invoked at the end. The lines outside any function definition (not indented) are executed in order of appearance.
Exercise 1.11.3.1. * Write a program, poem.py, that defines a function that prints a short poem or song verse. Give a meaningful name to the function. Have the program end by calling the function three times, so the poem or verse is repeated three times.
As a young child, you probably heard Happy Birthday sung to a couple of people, and then you could sing to a new person, say Maria, without needing to hear the whole special version with Maria's name in it word for word. You had the power of abstraction. With examples like the versions for Emily and Andre, you could figure out what change to make it so the song could be sung to Maria!
Unfortunately, Python is not that smart. It needs explicit rules. If you needed to explain explicitly to someone how Happy Birthday worked in general, rather than just by example, you might say something like this:
First you have to be given a person's name. Then you sing the song with the person's name inserted at the end of the third line.
Python works something like that, but with its own syntax. The term “person's name” serves as a stand-in for the actual data that will be used, “Emily”, “Andre”, or “Maria”. This is just like the association with a variable name in Python. “person's name” is not a legal Python identifier, so we will use just person as this stand-in.
The function definition indicates that the variable name person will be used inside the function by inserting it between the parentheses of the definition. Then in the body of the definition of the function, person is used in place of the real data for any specific person's name. Read and then run example program birthday6.py:
def happyBirthday(person): #1
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #2
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #3
print("Happy Birthday, dear " + person + ".") #4
print("Happy Birthday to you!") #5
happyBirthday('Emily') #6
happyBirthday('Andre') #7
In the definition heading for happyBirthday, person is referred to as a parameter, or a formal parameter. This variable name is a placeholder for the real name of the person being sung to.
The last two lines of the program, again, are the only ones outside of definitions, so they are the only ones executed directly. There is now an actual name between the parentheses in the function calls. The value between the parentheses here in the function call is referred to as an argument or actual parameter of the function call. The argument supplies the actual data to be used in the function execution. When the call is made, Python does this by associating the formal parameter name person with the actual parameter data, as in an assignment statement. In the first call, this actual data is 'Emily'. We say the actual parameter value is passed to the function.
The execution in greater detail:
The beauty of this system is that the same function definition can be used for a call with a different actual parameter variable, and then have a different effect. The value of the variable person is used in the third line of happyBirthday, to put in whatever actual parameter value was given.
This is the power of abstraction. It is one application of the most important principal in programming. Rather than have a number of separately coded parts with only slight variations, see where it is appropriate to combine them using a function whose parameters refer to the parts that are different in different situations. Then the code is written to be simultaneously appropriate for the separate specific situations, with the substitutions of the right parameter values.
You can go back to having a main function again, and everything works. Run birthday7.py:
def happyBirthday(person):
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear " + person + ".")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
def main():
happyBirthday('Emily')
happyBirthday('Andre')
main()
Exercise 1.11.4.1. * Make your own further change to the file and save it as birthdayMany.py: Add a function call, so Maria gets a verse, in addition to Emily and Andre. Also print a blank line between verses. (You may either do this by adding a print line to the function definition, or by adding a print line between all calls to the function.)
We can combine function parameters with user input, and have the program be able to print Happy Birthday for anyone. Check out the main method and run birthday_who.py:
def happyBirthday(person):
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
print("Happy Birthday, dear " + person + ".")
print("Happy Birthday to you!")
def main():
userName = input("Enter the Birthday person's name: ")
happyBirthday(userName)
main()
This last version illustrates several important ideas:
A function can have more than one parameter in a parameter list separated by commas. Here the example program addition5.py uses a function to make it easy to display many sum problems. Read and follow the code, and then run:
def sumProblem(x, y):
sum = x + y
print('The sum of ', x, ' and ', y, ' is ', sum, '.', sep='')
def main():
sumProblem(2, 3)
sumProblem(1234567890123, 535790269358)
a = int(input("Enter an integer: "))
b = int(input("Enter another integer: "))
sumProblem(a, b)
main()
The actual parameters in the function call are evaluated left to right, and then these values are associated with the
formal parameter names in the function definition, also left to right. For example the function call with
actual parameters, f(actual1, actual2, actual3), calling the function f with definition heading
def f(formal1, formal2, formal3):
acts approximately as if the first lines executed inside the called function were
formal1 = actual1
formal2 = actual2
formal3 = actual3
Functions provide extremely important functionality to programs, allowing task to be defined once and performed repeatedly with different data. It is essential to see the difference between the formal parameters used to describe what is done inside the function definition (like x and y in the definition of sumProblem) and the actual parameters (like 2 and 3 or 1234567890123 and 535790269358) which substitute for the formal parameters when the function is actually executed. The main method above uses three different sets of actual parameters in the three calls to sumProblem.
Exercise 1.11.5.1. '* Modify the program above and save it as quotientProb.py. The new program should have a quotientProblem function, printing as in the Exercise 1.10.3.2. The main method should test the function on several sets of literal values, and also test the function with input from the user.
You probably have used mathematical functions in algebra class, but they all had calculated values associated with them. For instance if you defined f(x) = x2, then it follows that f(3) is 32 = 9, and f(3) + f(4) is 32 + 42 = 25. Function calls in expressions get replaced during evaluation by the value of the function.
The corresponding definition and examples in Python would be the following, also in the example program return1.py. Read and run:
def f(x):
return x*x
print(f(3))
print(f(3) + f(4))
The new Python syntax is the return statement, with the word return followed by an expression. Functions that return values can be used in expressions, just like in math class. When an expression with a function call is evaluated, the function call is effectively replaced temporarily by its returned value. Inside the Python function, the value to be returned is given by the expression in the return statement. After the function f finishes executing from inside
print(f(3))
it is as if the statement temporarily became
print(9)
and similarly when executing
print(f(3) + f(4))
the interpreter first evaluates f(3) and effectively replaces the call by the returned result, 9, as if the statement temporarily became
print(9 + f(4))
and then the interpreter evaluates f(4) and effectively replaces the call by the returned result, 16, as if the statement temporarily became
print(9 + 16)
resulting finally in 25 being calculated and printed.
Python functions can return any type of data, not just numbers, and there can be any number of statements executed before the return statement. Read, follow, and run the example program return2.py:
def lastFirst(firstName, lastName): #1
separator = ', ' #2
result = lastName + separator + firstName #3
return result #4
print(lastFirst('Benjamin', 'Franklin')) #5
print(lastFirst('Andrew', 'Harrington')) #6
The code above has a new feature, variables separator and result are given a value in the function, but separator and result are not among the formal parameters. The assignments work as you would expect here. More on this shortly, in Section 1.11.8 on local scope.
Details of the execution:
Compare return2.py and addition5.py, from the previous section. Both use functions. Both print, but where the printing is done differs. The function sumProblem prints directly inside the function and returns nothing explicitly. On the other hand lastFirst does not print anything but returns a string. The caller gets to decide what to do with the string, and above it is printed in the main program.
Open addition5.py again, and introduce a common mistake. Change the last line of the function main inserting print, so it says
print(sumProblem(a, b))
Then try running the program. The desired printing is actually done inside the function sumProblem. You introduced a statement to print what sumProblem returns. Although sumProblem returns nothing explicitly, Python does make every function return something. If there is nothing explicitly returned, the special value None is returned. You should see that in the Shell output. This is a fairly common error. If you see a 'None' is your output where you do not expect it, it is likely that you have printed the return value of a function that did not return anything explicitly!
Exercise 1.11.6.1. Create quotientReturn.py by modifying quotientProb.py from Exercise 1.11.5.1 so that the program accomplishes the same thing, but everywhere change the quotientProblem function into one called quotientString that merely returns the string rather than printing the string directly. Have the main function print the result of each call to the quotientString function.
The remainder of Section1.11 covers finer points about functions that you might skip on a first reading.
We are only doing tiny examples so far to get the basic idea of functions. In much larger programs, functions are useful to manage complexity, splitting things up into logically related, modest sized pieces. Programmers are both writers of functions and consumers of the other functions called inside their functions. It is useful to keep those two roles separate:
The user of an already written function needs to know:
How this is accomplished is not relevant at this point. For instance, you use the work of the Python development team, calling functions that are built into the language. You need know the three facts about the functions you call. You do not need to know exactly how the function accomplishes its purpose.
On the other hand when you write a function you need to figure out exactly how to accomplish your goal, name relevant variables, and write your code, which brings us to the next section.
For the logic of writing functions, it is important that the writer of a function knows the names of variables inside the function. On the other hand, if you are only using a function, maybe written by someone unknown to you, you should not care what names are given to values used internally in the implementation of the function you are calling. Python enforces this idea with local scope rules: Variable names initialized and used inside one function are invisible to other functions. Such variables are called local variables. For example, an elaboration of the earlier program return2.py might have its lastFirst function with its local variable separator, but it might also have another function that defines a separator variable, maybe with a different value like '\n'. They do not conflict. They are independent. This avoids lots of errors!
For example, the following code in the example program badScope.py causes an execution error. Read it and run it, and see:
def main():
x = 3
f()
def f():
print(x) #f does not know about the x defined in main
main()
We will fix this error below. The execution error message mentions “global name”. Names defined outside any function definition, at the “top-level” of your program are called global. They are a special case. They are discussed more in the next section.
If you do want local data from one function to go to another, define the called function so it includes parameters! Read and compare and try the program goodScope.py:
def main():
x = 3
f(x)
def f(x):
print(x)
main()
With parameter passing, the parameter name x in the function f does not need to match the name of the actual parameter in main. The definition of f could just as well have been:
def f(whatever):
print(whatever)
If you define global variables (outside of any function definition), they are visible inside all of your functions. It is good programming practice to avoid defining global variables and instead to put your variables inside functions and explicitly pass them as parameters where needed. One common exception is constants: A constant is a name that you give a fixed data value to, by assigning a value to the name only in a single assignment statement. You can then use the name of the fixed data value in expressions later. A simple example program is constant.py:
PI = 3.14159265358979 # global constant -- only place the value of PI is set
def circleArea(radius):
return PI*radius*radius # use value of global constant PI
def circleCircumference(radius):
return 2*PI*radius # use value of global constant PI
print('circle area with radius 5:', circleArea(5))
print('circumference with radius 5:', circleCircumference(5))
This example uses numbers with decimal points, discussed more in Section 1.14.1. By convnetion, names for constants are all capital letters.
Issues with global variables do not come up if they are only used as constants.
Function names defined at the top-level also have global scope. This is what allows you to use one function you defined inside another function you define.
In common usage, a dictionary is a collection of words matched with their definitions. Given a word, you can look up its definition. Python has a built in dictionary type called dict which you can use to create dictionaries with arbitrary definitions for character strings. It can be used for the common usage, as in a simple English-Spanish dictionary.
Look at the example program spanish1.py and run it.
"""A tiny English to Spanish dictionary is created,
using the Python dictionary type dict.
Then the dictionary is used, briefly.
"""
spanish = dict()
spanish['hello'] = 'hola'
spanish['yes'] = 'si'
spanish['one'] = 'uno'
spanish['two'] = 'dos'
spanish['three'] = 'tres'
spanish['red'] = 'rojo'
spanish['black'] = 'negro'
spanish['green'] = 'verde'
spanish['blue'] = 'azul'
print(spanish['two'])
print(spanish['red'])
First an empty dictionary is created using dict(), and it is assigned the descriptive name spanish.
To refer to the definition for a word, you use the dictionary name, follow it by the word inside square brackets. This notation can either be used on the left-hand side of an assignment to make (or remake) a definition, or it can be used in an expression (as in the print functions), where its definition is one stored earlier into the dictionary. For example,
spanish['hello'] = 'hola'
makes an entry in our spanish dictionary for 'hello' , where the definition matched to it is 'hola'.
print(spanish['red'])
retrieves the definition for 'red', which is 'rojo'.
Since the Spanish dictionary is defined at the top-level, the variable name spanish is still defined after the program runs: after running the program, use spanish in the Shell to check out the translations of some more words, other than 'two' and 'red'.
Creating the dictionary is quite a different activity from the use at the end of the code, so with functions to encapsulate the tasks, we could write the example program spanish2.py instead, with the same result:
"""A tiny English to Spanish dictionary is created,
using the Python dictionary type dict.
Then the dictionary is used, briefly.
"""
def createDictionary():
'''Returns a tiny Spanish dictionary'''
spanish = dict() # creates an empty dictionary
spanish['hello'] = 'hola'
spanish['yes'] = 'si'
spanish['one'] = 'uno'
spanish['two'] = 'dos'
spanish['three'] = 'tres'
spanish['red'] = 'rojo'
spanish['black'] = 'negro'
spanish['green'] = 'verde'
spanish['blue'] = 'azul'
return spanish
def main():
dictionary = createDictionary()
print(dictionary['two'])
print(dictionary['red'])
main()
This code illustrates several things about functions.
We could also use the dictionary more extensively. The example program spanish2a.py is the same as above except it has the following main method
def main():
dictionary = createDictionary()
print('Count in Spanish: ' + dictionary['one'] + ', ' +
dictionary['two'] + ', ' + dictionary['three'] + ',...')
print('Spanish colors: ' + dictionary['red'] + ', ' +
dictionary['blue'] + ', ' + dictionary['green'] + ',...')
Try it, and check that it makes sense.
Python dictionaries are actually more general than the common use of dictionaries. They do not have to associate words and their string definitions. They can associate many types of objects with some arbitrary object. The more general Python terminology for word and definition are key and value. Given a key, you can look up the corresponding value. The only restriction on the key is that it be an immutable type. This means that a value of the key's type cannot be changed internally after it is initially created. Strings and numbers are immutable. A dictionary is mutable: its value can be changed internally. (You can add new definitions to it!) We will see more mutable and immutable types later and explore more of the internal workings of data types.
Exercise 1.12.1.1. * Write a tiny Python program numDict.py that makes a dictionary whose keys are the words 'one', 'two', 'three', and 'four', and whose corresponding values are the numerical equivalents, 1, 2, 3, and 4 (ints, not strings). Include code to test the resulting dictionary by referencing several of the definitions and printing the results.
At the end of the main function in spanish2a.py from the last section, two strings are constructed and printed. The expressions for the two strings include a sequence of literal strings concatenated with interspersed values from a dictionary. There is a much neater, more readable way to generate these strings. We will develop this in several steps. The first string could be constructed and printed as follows:
numberFormat = "Count in Spanish: {one}, {two}, {three}, ..."
withSubstitutions = numberFormat.format(one='uno', two='dos', three='tres')
print(withSubstitutions)
There are several new ideas here!.
Note the form of the string assigned the name numberFormat: It has the English words for numbers in braces where we want the Spanish definitions substituted.
The second line uses method calling syntax. You will see this in more detail at the beginning of the next chapter. Strings and other objects have a special syntax for functions tightly associated with the particular type of object. Such functions are called methods. In particular str objects have a method called format. The syntax for methods
object.methodname(paramters)
has the object followed by a period followed by the method name, and further parameters in parentheses.
In the example above, the object is the string called numberFormat. The method is named format. The parameters in this case are all keyword parameters. You have already seen keyword parameters sep and end used in print function calls. In this particular application, the keywords are chosen to include all the words that appear enclosed in braces in the numberFormat string.
When the string numberFormat has the format method applied to it with the given keyword parameters, a new string is created with substitutions into the places enclosed in braces. The substitutions are just the values given by the keyword parameters. Hence the printed result is
Count in Spanish: uno, dos, tres, ...
Now we go one step further: The keyword parameters associate the keyword names with the values after the equal signs. The dictionary from spanish2a.py includes exactly the same associations. There is a special notation allowing such a dictionary to supply keyword parameters. Assuming dictionary is the Spanish dictionary from spanish2a.py, the method call
numberFormat.format(one='uno', two='dos', three='tres')
returns the same string as
numberFormat.format(**dictionary)
The special syntax ** before the dictionary indicates that the dictionary is not to be treated as a single regular parameter. Instead keyword arguments for all the entries in the dictionary effectively appear in its place.
Below is a substitute for the main method in spanish2a.py. The whole revised program is in example program spanish3.py.
def main():
dictionary = createDictionary()
numberFormat = "Count in Spanish: {one}, {two}, {three}, ..."
withSubstitutions = numberFormat.format(**dictionary)
print(withSubstitutions)
print("Spanish colors: {red}, {blue}, {green}, ...".format(**dictionary))
The string with the numbers is constructed in steps as discussed above. The printing of the string with the Spanish colors is coded more concisely. There are not named variables for the format string or the resulting formatted string. You are free to use either coding approach.
In general, use this syntax for the string format method with a dictionary, returning a new formatted string:
formatString.format(**aDictionary)
where the format string contains dictionary keys in braces where you want the dictionary values substituted. The dictionary key names must follow the rules for legal identifiers.
At this point we have discussed in some detail everything that went into the first sample program, madlib.py, of Section 1.2.3! This is certainly the most substantial program so far.
Look at madlib.py again, see how we have used most of the ideas so far. If you want more description, you might look at section 1.2.3 again (or for the first time): it should make much more sense now.
Exercise 1.12.2.1. To confirm your better understanding of madlib.py, load it in the editor, rename it as myMadlib.py, and modify it to have a less lame story, with more and different entries in the dictionary. Make sure addPick is called for each key in your format string. Test your version.
We will use madlib.py as a basis for more substantial modifications in structure in Section 2.3.3.
Dictionaries are central to the implementation of Python. Each variable identifier is associated with a particular value. These relationships are stored in dictionaries in Python, and these dictionaries are accessible to the user: You can use the function call locals() to return a dictionary containing all the current local variables names as keys and all their values as the corresponding dictionary values. This dictionary can be used with the string format method, so you can embed local variable names in a format string and use then very easily!
For example, run the example program arithDict.py:
'''Fancier format string example, with locals().'''
x = 20
y = 30
sum = x+y
prod = x*y
formatStr = '{x} + {y} = {sum}; {x} * {y} = {prod}.'
equations = formatStr.format(**locals())
print(equations)
Note the variable names inside braces in formatStr, and the dictionary reference used as the format parameter is **locals().
A string like formatStr is probably the most readable way to code the creation of a string from a collection of literal strings and program values. The ending part of the syntax, .format(**locals()), may appear a bit strange, but it is very useful! We will use this notation extensively to clearly indicate how values are embedded into strings.
The example program hello_you4.py does the same thing as the earlier hello_you versions, but with a dictionary reference:
person = input('Enter your name: ')
greeting = 'Hello {person}!'.format(**locals())
print(greeting)
Modern computers can do millions or even billions of instructions a second. With the techniques discussed so far, it would be hard to get a program that would run by itself for more than a fraction of a second.6 Practically, we cannot write millions of instructions to keep the computer busy. To keep a computer doing useful work we need repetition, looping back over the same block of code again and again. There are two Python statement types to do that: the simpler for loops, which we take up shortly, and while loops, which we take up later, in Section 3.3. Two preliminaries: First, the value of already defined variables can be updated. This will be particularly important in loops. We start by following how variables can be updated in an even simpler situation. Second, for loops involve sequence types, so we will first look at a basic sequence type: list. This is a long section. Go carefully.
The programs so far have defined and used variables, but other than in early shell examples we have not changed the value of existing variables. For now consider a particularly simple example, just chosen as an illustration, in the example file updateVar.py:
x = 3 #1
y = x + 2 #2
y = 2*y #3
x = y - x #4
print(x, y) #5
Can you predict the result? Run the program and check. Particularly if you did not guess right, it is important to understand what happens, one step at a time. That means keeping track of what changes to variables are made by each statement. In the table below, statements are referred to by the numbers labeling the lines in the code above. We can track the state of each variable after each line in executed. A dash is shown where a variable is not defined. For instance after line 1 is executed, a value is given to x, but y is still undefined. Then y gets a value in line 2. The comment on the right summarizes what is happening. Since x has the value 3 when line 2 starts, x+2 is the same as 3+2. In line three we use the fact that the right side of an assignment statement uses the values of variables when the line starts executing (what is left after the previous line of the table executed), but the assignment to the variable y on the left causes a change to y, and hence the updated value of y, 10, is shown in the table. Line 4 then changes x, using the latest value of y (10, not the initial value 5!). The result from line 5 confirms the values of x and y.
| Line | x | y | comment |
| 1 | 3 | - | |
| 2 | 3 | 5 | 5=3+2, using the value of x from the previous line |
| 3 | 3 | 10 | 10=2*5 on the right, use the value of y from the previous line |
| 4 | 7 | 19 | 7=10-3 on the right, use the value of x and y from the previous line |
| 5 | 7 | 10 | print: 7 10 |
The order of execution will always be the order of the lines in the table. In this simple sequential code, that also follows the textual order of the program. Following each line of execution of a program in order, carefully, keeping track of the current values of variables, will be called playing computer. A table like the one above is an organized way to keep track.
Lists are ordered sequences of arbitrary data. Lists are the first kind of data discussed so far that are mutable: the length of the sequence can be changed and elements substituted. We will delay the discussion of changes to lists until a further introduction to objects. Lists can be written explicitly. Read the following examples
['red', 'green', 'blue']
[1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11]
['silly', 57, 'mixed', -23, 'example']
[] # the empty list
The basic format is square-bracket-enclosed, comma-separated lists of arbitrary data.
There is a built-in function range, that can be used to automatically generate regular arithmetic sequences. Try the following in the Shell:
list(range(4))
list(range(10))
The general pattern for use is
range(sizeOfSequence)
This syntax will generate the items, one at a time, as needed. If you want to see all the results at once as a list, you can convert to a list as in the examples above. The resulting sequence starts at 0 and ends before the parameter. We will see there are good reasons to start from 0 in Python. One important property of sequences generated by range(n) is that the total number of elements is n. The sequence omits the number n itself, but includes 0 instead.
With more parameters, the range function can be used to generate a much wider variety of sequences. The elaborations are discussed in Section 2.4.12 and Section 3.3.2.
Try the following in the Shell. You get a sequence of continuation lines before the Shell responds. Be sure to indent the second and third lines. (This is only needed inthe Shell, not in an edit window, where the indentation is automatic). Be sure to enter another empty line (just Enter) at the end to get the Shell to respond.
for count in [1, 2, 3]:
print(count)
print('Yes' * count)
This is a for loop. It has the heading starting with for, followed by a variable name (count in this case), the word in, some sequence, and a final colon. As with function definitions and other heading lines ending with a colon, the colon at the end of the line indicates that a consistently indented block of statements follows to complete the for loop.
for item in sequence:
indented statements to repeat
The block of lines is repeated once for each element of the sequence, so in this example the two lines in the indented block are repeated three times. Furthermore the variable in the heading (count here) may be used in the block, and each time through it takes on the next value in the sequence, so the first time through the loop count is 1, then 2, and finally 3. Look again at the output and see that it matches this sequence.
There is a reason the interpreter waited to respond until after you entered an empty line: The interpreter did not know how long the loop block was going to be! The empty line is a signal to the interpreter that you are done with the loop block.
Look at the following example program for123.py, and run it.
for count in [1, 2, 3]: #1
print(count) #2
print('Yes'*count) #3
print('Done counting.') #4
for color in ['red', 'blue', 'green']: #5
print(color) #6
In a file, where the interpreter does not need to respond immediately, the blank line is not necessary. Instead, as with a function definition or any other format with an indented block, you indicate being past the indented block by dedenting to line up with the for-loop heading. Hence in the code above, “Done Counting.” is printed once after the first loop completes all its repetitions. Execution ends with another simple loop.
As with the indented block in a function, it is important to get the indentation right. Alter the code above, so line 4 is indented:
for count in [1, 2, 3]: #1
print(count) #2
print('Yes'*count) #3
print('Done counting.') #4
for color in ['red', 'blue', 'green']: #5
print(color) #6
Predict the change, and run the code again to test.
Loops are one of the most important features in programming. While the syntax is pretty simple, using them creatively to solve problems (rather than just look at a demonstration) is among the biggest challenges for many learners at an introductory level. One way to simplify the learning curve is to classify common situations and patterns. One of the simplest patterns is illustrated above, simple for-each loops.
for item in sequence
do some thing with item
(It would be even more like English if for were replace by for each, but the shorter version is the one used by Python.)
In the for-loop examples above, something is printed that is related to each item in the list. Printing is certainly one form of “do something”, but the possibilities for “do something” are completely general!
We can use a for-each loop to revise our first example. Recall the code from madlib.py:
addPick('animal', userPicks)
addPick('food', userPicks)
addPick('city', userPicks)
Each line is doing exactly the same thing, except varying the string used as the cue, while repeating the rest of the line. This is the for-each pattern, but we need to list the sequence that the cues come from. Read the alternative:
for cue in ['animal', 'food', 'city']: # heading
addPick(cue, userPicks) # body
If you wish to see or run the whole program with this small modification, see the example madlibloop.py.
It is important to understand the sequence of operations, how execution goes back and forth between the heading and the body. Here are the details:
This looping construction would be even handier if you were to modify the original mad lib example, and had a story with many more cues. Also this revision will allow for further improvements in Section 2.3.3, after we introduce more about string manipulation.
The examples above all used the value of the variable in the for-loop heading. An even simpler for-loop usage is when you just want to repeat the exact same thing a specific number of times. In that case only the length of the sequence, not the individual elements are important. We have already seen that the range function provides an ease way to produce a sequence with a specified number of elements. Read and run the example program repeat1.py:
for i in range(10):
print('Hello')
In this situation, the variable i is not used inside the body of the for-loop.
The user could choose the number of times to repeat. Read and run the example program repeat2.py:
n = int(input('Enter the number of times to repeat: '))
for i in range(n):
print('This is repetitious!')
Suppose I have a list of items called items, and I want to print out each item and number them successively. For instance if items is ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'], I would like to see the output:
1 red
2 orange
3 yellow
4 green
Read about the following thought process for developing this:
If I allow myself to omit the numbers, it is easy: For any item in the list, I can process it with
print(item)
and I just go through the list and do it for each one. (Copy and run if you like.)
items = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green']
for item in items:
print(item)
Clearly the more elaborate version with numbers has a pattern with some consistency, each line is at least in the form:
number item
but the number changes each time, and the numbers do not come straight from the list of items.
A variable can change, so it makes sense to have a variable number, so we have the potential to make it change correctly. We could easily get it right the first time, and then repeat the same number. Read and run the example program numberEntries1.py:
items = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green']
number = 1
for item in items:
print(number, item)
Of course this is still not completely correct, since the idea was to count. After the first time number is printed, it needs to be changed to 2, to be right the next time through the loop, as in the following code: Read and run the example program numberEntries2.py:
items = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green']
number = 1
for item in items:
print(number, item)
number = 2
This is closer, but still not completely correct, since we never get to 3! We need a way to change the value of number that will work each time through the loop. The pattern of counting is simple, so simple in fact that you probably do not think consciously about how you go from one number to the next: You can describe the pattern by saying each successive number is one more than the previous number. We need to be able to change number so it is one more than it was before. That is the additional idea we need! Change the last line of the loop body to get the example program numberEntries3.py. See the addition and run it:
items = ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] #1
number = 1 #2
for item in items: #3
print(number, item) #4
number = number + 1 #5
It is important to understand the step-by-step changes during execution. Below is another table showing the results of playing computer. The line numbers are much more important here to keep track of the flow of control, because of the jumping around at the end of the loop.
| Line | items | item | number | comment |
| 1 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | - | - | |
| 2 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | - | 1 | |
| 3 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'red' | 1 | start with item as first in sequence |
| 4 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'red' | 1 | print: 1 red |
| 5 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'red' | 2 | 2 = 1+1 |
| 3 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'orange' | 2 | on to the next element in sequence |
| 4 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'orange' | 2 | print 2 orange |
| 5 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'orange' | 3 | 3=2+1 |
| 3 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'yellow' | 3 | on to the next element in sequence |
| 4 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'yellow' | 3 | print 3 yellow |
| 5 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'yellow' | 4 | 4=3+1 |
| 3 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'green' | 4 | on to the last element in sequence |
| 4 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'green' | 4 | print 4 green |
| 5 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'green' | 5 | 5=4+1 |
| 3 | ['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'] | 'green' | 5 | sequence done, end loop and code |
The final value of number is never used, but that is OK. What we want is printed.
This short example illustrates a lot of ideas:
There is a general pattern to loops with successive modification of a variable like number above:
This information can be put in a code outline:
Initialize variables to be modified
Loop heading controlling the repetition
Do the desired action with the current variables
Modify variables to be ready for the action the next time
If you compare this pattern to the for-each and simple repeat loops in Section 1.13.4, you see that the examples there were simpler. There was no explicit variable modification needed to prepare for the next time though the loop. We will refer to the latest, more general pattern as a successive modification loop.
Functions are handy for encapsulating an idea for use and reuse in a program, and also for testing. We can write a function to number a list, and easily test it with different data. Read and run the example program numberEntries4.py:
def numberList(items):
'''Print each item in a list items, numbered in order.'''
number = 1
for item in items:
print(number, item)
number = number + 1
def main():
numberList(['red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green'])
print()
numberList(['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'])
main()
Make sure you can follow the whole sequence, step by step! This program has the most complicated flow of control so far, changing both for function calls and loops.
Suppose you want to add up all the numbers in a list, nums. Let us plan this as a function from the beginning, so read the code below. We can start with:
def sumList(nums):
'''Return the sum of the numbers in nums.'''
If you do not see what to do right away, a useful thing to do is write down a concrete case, and think how you would solve it, in complete detail. If nums is [2, 6, 3, 8], you would likely calculate
2+6 is 8
8 + 3 is 11
11 + 8 is 19
19 is the answer to be returned.
Since the list may be arbitrarily long, you need a loop. Hence you must find a pattern so that you can keep reusing the same statements in the loop. Obviously you are using each number in the sequence in order. You also generate a sum in each step, which you reuse in the next step. The pattern is different, however, in the first line, 2+6 is 8: there is no previous sum, and you use two elements from the list. The 2 is not added to a previous sum.
Although it is not the shortest way to do the calculation by hand, 2 is a sum of 0 + 2: We can make the pattern consistent and calculate:
start with a sum of 0
0 + 2 is 2
2 + 6 is 8
8 + 3 is 11
11 + 8 is 19
19 is the answer.
Then the second part of each sum is a number from the list, nums. If we call the number from the list num, the main calculation line in the loop could be
nextSum = sum + num
The trick is to use the same line of code the next time through the loop. That means what was nextSum in one pass becomes the sum in the next pass. One way to handle that is:
sum = 0
for num in nums:
nextSum = sum + num
sum = nextSum
Do you see the pattern? Again it is
initialization
loop heading
main work to be repeated
preparation for the next time through the loop
Sometimes the two general loop steps can be combined. This is such a case. Since nextSum is only used once, we can just substitute its value (sum) where it is used and simplify to:
sum = 0
for num in nums:
sum = sum + num
so the whole function, with the return statement is:
def sumList(nums): #1
'''Return the sum of the numbers in nums.'''
sum = 0 #2
for num in nums: #3
sum = sum + num #4
return sum #5
With the following (not indented) line below used to test the function, you have the example program sumNums.py. Run it.
print(sumList([5, 2, 4, 7]))
The pattern used here is certainly successive modification (of the sum variable). It is useful to give a more specialized name for this version of the pattern here. It follows an accumulation pattern:
initialize the accumulation to include none of the sequence (sum = 0 here)
for item in sequence :
new value of accumulation = result of combining item with last value of accumulation
This pattern will work in many other situations besides adding numbers.
Exercise 1.13.7.1. * Suppose the function sumList, is called with the parameter [5, 2, 4, 7]. Play computer on this call. Make sure there is a row in the table for each line executed in the program, each time it is executed. In each row enter which program line is being executed and show all changes caused to variables by the execution of the line. A table is started for you below. The final line of your table should be for line 5, with the comment, “return 18”. If you do something like this longhand, and the same long value repeats a number of times, it is more convenient to put a ditto (“) for each repeated variable value or even leave it blank. If you want to do it on a computer you can start from the first table in example file playComputerSumStub.rtf. First save the file as playComputerSum.rtf.
| Line | nums | sum | num | comment |
| 1 | [5, 2, 4, 7] | - | - | |
| 2 | ||||
Exercise 1.13.7.2. * Write a program testSumList.py which includes a main function to test the sumList function several times. Include a test for the extreme case, with an empty list.
Exercise 1.13.7.3. ** Complete the following function. This starting code is in joinAllStub.py. Save it to the new name joinAll.py. Note the way an example is given in the documentation string. It simulates the use of the function in the Shell. This is a common convention:
def joinStrings(stringList):
'''Join all the strings in stringList into one string,
and return the result. For example:
>>> print(joinStrings(['very', 'hot', 'day']))
'veryhotday'
'''
Testing code by running it is fine, but looking at the results does not mean you really understand what is going on, particularly if there is an error! People who do not understand what is happening are likely to make random changes to their code in an attempt to fix errors. This is a very bad, increasingly self-defeating practice, since you are likely to never learn where the real problem lies, and the same problem is likely to come back to bite you.
It is important to be able to predict accurately what code will do. We have illustrated playing computer on a variety of small chunks of code.
Playing computer can help you find bugs (errors in your code). Some errors are syntax errors caught by the interpreter in translation. Some errors are only caught by the interpreter during execution, like failing to have a value for a variable you use. Other errors are not caught by the interpreter at all – you just get the wrong answer. These are called logical errors. Earlier logical errors can also trigger an execution error later. This is when playing computer is particularly useful.
A common error in trying to write the numberList function would be to have:
def numberList(items): # WRONG code for illustration!!!! #1
'''Print each item in a list items, numbered in order.''' #2
for item in items: #3
number = 1 #4
print(number, item) #5
number = number + 1 #6
You can run this code in numberEntriesWRONG.py and see that it produces the wrong answer. If you play computer on the call to numberList(['apples', 'pears', 'bananas']), you can see the problem:
| Line | items | item | number | comment |
| 1 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | - | - | pass actual parameter value to items |
| 3 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'apples' | - | start with item as first in sequence |
| 4 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'apples' | 1 | |
| 5 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'apples' | 1 | print: 1 apples |
| 6 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'apples' | 2 | 2 = 1+1 |
| 3 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'pears' | 2 | on to the next element in sequence |
| 4 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'apples' | 1 | |
| 5 | ['apples', 'pears', 'bananas'] | 'pears' | 1 | print: 1 pears OOPS! |
If you go step by step you should see where the incorrect 1 came from: the initialization is repeated each time in the loop at line 4, undoing the incrementing of number in line 6, messing up your count. Always be careful that your one-time initialization for a loop goes before the loop, not in it!
Functions can also return values. Consider the Python for this mathematical sequence: define the function m(x) = 5x, let y = 3; find m(y) + m(2y-1).
def m(x): #1
return 5*x #2
y = 3 #3
print(m(y) + m(2*y-1)) #4
A similar example was considered in Section 1.11.6, but now add the idea of playing computer and recording the sequence in a table. Like when you simplify a mathematical expression, Python must complete the innermost parts first. Tracking the changes means following the function calls carefully and using the values returned. Again a dash '-' is used in the table to indicate an undefined variable. Not only are local variables like formal parameters undefined before they are first used, they are also undefined after the termination of the function,
| Line | x | y | comment |
| 3 | - | 3 | (definitions only before this line) |
| 4 | - | 3 | start on: print m(y) + m(2*y-1); find m(y), which is m(3) |
| 1 | 3 | 3 | pass 3 to function m, so x =3 |
| 2 | 3 | 3 | return 5*3 = 15 |
| 4 | - | 3 | substitute result: print 15 + m(2*y-1), find m(2*y-1), which is m(2*3-1) = m(5) |
| 1 | 5 | 3 | pass 5 to function m, so x=5 |
| 2 | 5 | 3 | return 5*5 = 25 |
| 4 | - | 3 | substitute result: print 15 + 25, so calculate and print 40 |
Thus far most of the code given has been motivated first, so you are likely to have an idea what to expect. You may need to read code written by someone else (or even yourself a while back!) where you are not sure what is intended. Also you might make a mistake and accidental write code that does something unintended! If you really understand how Python works, one line at a time, you should be able to play computer and follow at least short code sequences that have not been explained before. It is useful to read another person's code and try to follow it. The next exercises also provides code that has not been explained first:or has a mistake.
Exercise 1.13.8.1. ** Play computer on the following code. Reality check: 31 is printed when line 6 finally executes. Table headings are shown below to get you started with a pencil. Alternately you can work in a word processor starting from playComputerStub.rtf, which has tables set up for this and the following exercise. Save the file with an alternate name playComputer.rtf.
x = 0 #1
y = 1 #2
for n in [5, 4, 6]: #3
x = x + y*n #4
y = y + 1 #5
print(x) #6
| Line | x | y | n | Comment |
Exercise 1.13.8.2. ** The following code is supposed to compute the product of the numbers in a list. For instance product([5, 4, 6]) should calculate and return 5*4*6=120 in steps, calculating 5, 5*4=20 and 20*6=120 . Play computer on a call to product([5, 4, 6]) until you see that it makes a mistake. This code appears in the example file numProductWrong.py. Save it as numProduct.py and fix the error (and save again!). Table headings and the first row are shown below to get you started with a pencil. Alternately you can work in a word processor continuing to add to playComputer.rtf, started in the previous exercise.
def product(nums): #1
for n in nums: #2
prod = 1 #3
prod = prod*n #4
return prod #5
| Line | nums | n | prod | Comment |
| 1 | [5, 4, 6] | - | - | |
Exercise 1.13.8.3. ** Play computer on the following code. Table headings are shown for you. Reality check: 70 is printed. See the previous exercises if you enter your answer in a file.
def f(x): #1
return x+4 #2
print(f(3)*f(6)) #3
| Line | x | Comment |
By default the print function adds a newline to the end of the string being printed. this can be overridden by including the keyword parameter end. The keyword end can be set equal to any string. The most common replacements are the empty string or a single blank. If you also use the keyword parameter sep, these keyword paramters may be in either order, but they msut come at the end of the parmater list. Read the illustrations:
print('all', 'on', 'same', 'line')
print('different line')
is equivalent to
print('all', 'on' , end = ' ')
print('same', end = ' ')
print('line')
print('different line')
This does not work directly in the shell (where you are always forced to a new line at the end). It does work in a program, but it is not very useful except in a loop! Suppose I want to print a line with all the elements of a list, separated by spaces, but not on separate lines. I can use the end keyword set to a space in the loop. Can you figure out in your head what this example file endSpace1.py does? Then try it:
def listOnOneLine(items):
for item in items:
print(item, end=' ')
listOnOneLine(['apple', 'banana', 'pear'])
print('This may not be what you expected!')
If you still want to go on to a new line at the end of the loop, you must include a print function that does advance to the next line, once, after the loop. Try this variation, endSpace2.py
def listOnOneLine(items):
for item in items:
print(item, end=' ')
print()
listOnOneLine(['apple', 'banana', 'pear'])
print('This is probably better!')
Floating point numbers like 12.345 are a basic type, but there are some complications due to their inexactness. This section may be deferred until you actually need numbers other than integers.
As you moved on in school after your first integer division, and did fractions and decimals, you probably thought of 6/8 as a fraction and could convert to a decimal .75. Python can do decimal calculations, too, approximately.
Try all set-off lines in this section in the Shell:
6/8
6/3
2.3/25.7
There is more going on here than meets the eye. As you should know, decimal representations of values can be a pain. They may not be able to be expressed with a finite number of characters. Try
2/3
Also, as you may have had emphasized in science class, real number measurements are often not exact, and so the results of calculations with them are not exact. In fact there are an infinite number of real number just between 0 and 1, and a computer is finite. It cannot store all those numbers exactly! On the other hand, Python does store integers exactly (well at least far past the number of atoms in the universe – eventually even integers could get too big to store in a computer). The difference in the way integers and decimals are stored and processed leads to decimals and integers being different types in Python. Try
type(3.5)
Note that 3.5 is of type 'float', not 'decimal'. There are several reasons for that name having to do with the actual way the type is stored internally. “Decimal” implies base ten, our normal way for writing numbers with ten digits 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Computers actually use base two, with only two symbols 0,1. (Did you note what symbols were in the machine language in Section 1.1?) Also floats use an encoding something like scientific notation from science class, with exponents that allow the decimal point to move or “float”, as in the decimal case: 2345.6 = (2.3456)103
Try
type(-2)
type(-2.0)
Even a number that is actually an integer can be represented in the float type if a decimal point is included.
Always be sure to remember that floats may not be exact. The use of base two makes this true even in cases where decimal numbers can be expressed exactly! More on that at the end of this section on formatting floats.
It is sometimes important to know the numeric type of a Python value. Any combination of +, -, and * with operands of type int produces an int. If there is an operation /, or if any operand is of type float, the result is float. Try each in the Shell (and guess the resulting type):9
3.3 - 1.1
2.0 + 3
2.5*2
Exponentiation is finding powers. In mathematical notation, (3)(3)(3)(3) = 34 = 81: In Python there is no fancy typography with raised exponent symbols like the 4, so Python uses ** before a power: Try in the Shell:
3**4
5*2**3
If you expected 1000 for the second one, remember exponentiation has even higher precedence than multiplication and division: 2**3 is 2*2*2 or 8, and 5*8 is 40.
Exponents do not need to be integers. A useful example is the 0.5 power: it produces a square root. Try in the Shell:
9**.5
2**.5
The result of a power operation is of int type only if both parameters are integers and the correct result is an integer.
You generally do not want to display a floating point result of a calculation in its raw form, often with an enormous number of digits after the decimal point, like 23.457413902458498. You are likely to prefer rounding it to something like 23.46. There are two approaches.
First there is a format function (not method) with a second parameter allowed to specialize the formatting of objects as strings.. Read the following example interpreter sequence showing possibilites when a float is being formatted:
>>> x = 23.457413902458498
>>> format(x, '.5f')
>>> '23.45741'
>>> format(x, '.2f')
>>> '23.46'
Note that the results are rounded not truncated: the result to two places is 23.46, not 23.45. The formatting string '.5f' means after the decimal point round to 5 places. Similarly '.2f' means round to two decimal places.
This rounding notation can also be placed after a colon inside the braces of format strings, for use with the string format method. Read the Shell session:
>>> x = 2.876543
>>> 'longer: {x:.5f}, shorter: {x:.3f}.'.format(**locals())
>>> 'longer: 2.87654, shorter: 2.877.'
The colon separates the symbol identifying what value to use for the substitution from the instructions for the specific formating method.
The colon and formatting instructions can also be used with the format versions depending on the order of the parameters. Continuing the earlier Shell example:
>>> 'No dictionary: {:.5f}.'.format(x)
>>> 'No dictionary: 2.87654.'
There are many more fancy formatting options for the string format method that we will not discuss.
Going to the opposite extreme, and using formatting with many digits, you can check that Python does not necessarily remember simple decimal numbers exactly:
>>> format(.1, '.20f')
'0.10000000000000000555'
>>> format(.2, '.20f')
'0.20000000000000001110'
>>> format(.1 + .2, '.20f')
'0.30000000000000004441'
>>> format(.3, '.20f')
'0.29999999999999998890'
>>>
Python stores the numbers correctly to about 16 or 17 digits. You may not care about such slight errors, but you will be able to check in Chapter 3 that if Python tests the expressions .1 + .2 and .3 for equality, it decides that they are not equal! In fact, as you can see above, the approximations that Python stores for the two expressions are not exactly equal. Do not depend on the exactness of floating point arithmetic, even for apparently simple expressions!
The floating point formatting code in this section is also in example program floatFormat.py.
Exercise 1.14.3.1. * Write a program, discount.py, that prompts the user for an original price and for a discount percentage and prints out the new price to the nearest cent. For example if the user enters 2.89 for the price and 20 for the discount percentage, the value would be (1- 20/100)*2.89, rounded to two decimal places, 2.31. For price .65 with a 25 percent discount, the value would be (1- 25/100)*.65, rounded to two decimal places, .49.10 Write the general calculation code following the pattern of the calculations illustrated in the two concrete examples.
Section numbers in square brackets indicate where an idea was first discussed.
Where Python syntax is illustrated, the typeface indicates the the category of each part:
| Typeface | Meaning |
| Typewriter font | Text to be written verbatim |
| Emphasized | A place where you can use an arbitrary identifier. The emphasized text attempts to be descriptive of the meaning of the identifier in the current context. |
| Normal text | A description of what goes in that position, without giving explicit syntax |
If there are several variations on a particular part of the syntax, alternatives will be show on successive lines.
To emphasize the successive parts of the syntax, space will generally be left around symbol and punctuation characters, but the space is not required in actual use.
Example: 'A word: {}, a number: {}, a formatted number:
{:.3f}.'.format('Joe', 23, 2.13579)
evaluates to: 'A word: Joe, a number: 23, a formatted number: 2.136.'
for item in sequence :
consistently indented statement block, which may use the variable item
For each element in the sequence, repeat the statement block substituting the next element in the sequence for the name variable name item. See Programming Patterns for patterns of use. [1.13.4]
def functionName ( parameter1, parameter2, and so on) :
consistently indented statement block, which may include a return statement
for i in range(n):
actions to be repeated
Here the variable i is included only because there must be a variable name in a for-loop. [1.13.5]
for item in sequence :
actions to be done with each item
initialize all variables that will be successively modified in the loop
loop heading for the repetition :
actions to be in each loop with the current variable values
modify the variable values to prepare for the next time through the loop
initialize the accumulation to include none of the sequence
for item in sequence :
new value of accumulation =
result of combining item with last value of accumulation
Python is an object-oriented language. Every piece of data and even functions and types are objects. The term object-oriented is used to distinguish Python from earlier languages, classified as procedural languages, where types of data and the operations on them were not connected in the language. The functions we have used so far follow the older procedural programming syntax. In the newer paradigm of object-oriented programming, all data are in objects, and a core group of operations that can be done on some particular type of object are tightly bound to the object and called the object's methods.
For example, strings are objects, and strings “know how” to produce an uppercase version of themselves. Try in the Shell:
s = 'Hello!'
s.upper()
Here upper is a method associated with strings. This means upper is a function that is bound to the string before the dot. This function is bound both logically, and as we see in the new notation, also syntactically. One way to think about it is that each type of data knows operations (methods) that can be applied to it. The expression s.upper() calls the method upper that is bound to the string s and returns a new uppercase string result based on s.
Strings are immutable, so no string method can change the original string, it can only return a new string. Confirm this by entering each line individually in the Shell to see the original s is unchanged:
s
s2 = s.upper()
s2
s
We are using the new object syntax:
object.method( )
meaning that the method associated with the object's type is applied to the object. This is just a special syntax for a function call with an object.
Another string method is lower, analogous to upper, but producing a lowercase result.
Test yourself : How would you write the expression to produce a lowercase version of the string s?
Answer:1
Try it in the Shell.
Test yourself in the Shell: How would you use this string s and both the lower and upper methods to create the string
'hello!HELLO!' ? Hint: 2
Answer: 3
Many methods also take additional parameters between the parentheses, using the more general syntax
object.method(parameters)
The first of many such methods we will introduce is count:
Syntax for count:
s.count(sub)
Count and return the number of repetitions of a string sub that appear as substrings inside the string s.
Read and make sure you see the answers are correct:
>>> tale = 'This is the best of times.'
>>> tale.count('i')
3
>>> tale.count('is')
2
>>> tale.count('That')
0
>>> tale.count(' ')
5
There is a blank between the quotes in the line above. Blanks are characters like any other (except you can't see them)!
Just as the parameter can be replaced by a literal or any expression, the object to which a method is bound with the dot may also be given by a literal, or a variable name, or any expression that evaluates to the right kind of object in its place. This is true for any method call.
Technically the dot between the object and the method name is an operator, and operators have different levels of precedence. It is important to realize that this dot operator has the highest possible precedence. Read and see the difference parentheses make in the expressions:
>>> 'hello ' + 'there'.upper()
'hello THERE'
>>> ('hello ' + 'there').upper()
'HELLO THERE'
To see if you understand this precedence, predict the results of each line and then test in the Shell:
3 * 'X'.count('XXX')
(3 * 'X').count('XXX')
There are 0 'XXX's in 'X', but 1 'XXX' in 'XXX'.
Python lets you see all the methods that are bound to an object (and any object of its type) with the built-in function dir. To see all string methods, supply the dir function with any string. For example, try in the Shell:
dir('')
Many of the names in the list start and end with two underscores, like __add__. These are all associated with methods and pieces of data used internally by the Python interpreter. You can ignore them for now. The remaining entries in the list are all user-level methods for strings. You should see lower and upper among them. Some of the methods are much more commonly used than others.
Object notation
object.method(parameters)
has been illustrated so far with just the object type str, but it applies to all types. Later in the tutorial methods such as the following will be discussed:
If seq is a list, seq.append(element) appends element to the end of the list.
If myData is a file, myData.read() will read and return the entire contents of the file....
A string is a sequence of smaller components (individual characters), and it is often useful to deal with parts of strings. Python indexes the characters in a string, starting from 0, so for instance, the characters in the string 'computer' have indices:
| character | c | o | m | p | u | t | e | r |
| index | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
Each index is associated with a character, and you reference the individual characters much like in a dictionary. Try the following. (You can skip the comments that make the indices explicit.) Enter in the Shell:
# 01234567
s = 'computer'
s[0]
s[5]
s[8]
You cannot refer directly to a character that is not there. Indices only go to 7 in the example above.
Recall the len function, which gives the length of a sequence. It works on strings. Guess the following value, and test in the Shell:
len(s)
A common error is to think the last index will be the same as the length of the string, but as you saw above, that leads to an execution error. If the length of some string is 5, what is the index of its last character? What if the length is 35?
Hopefully you did not count by ones all the way from 0. The indices for a string of length n are the elements of the sequence range(n), which goes from 0 through n-1, or the length of the string minus one, which is 5-1=4 or 35-1 = 34 in these examples.
Sometimes you are interested in the last few elements of a string and do not want to do calculations like this. Python makes it easy. You can index from the right end of the string. Since positive integers are used to index from the front, negative integers are used to index from the right end, so the more complete table of indices for 'computer' gives two alternatives for each character:
| character | c | o | m | p | u | t | e | r |
| index | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| index from the right end | -8 | -7 | -6 | -5 | -4 | -3 | -2 | -1 |
Predict and test each individual line, continuing in the Shell:
s[-1]
s[-3]
s[-10]
it = 'horse'
len(it)
it[-1]
it[1]
Be careful - remember what the initial index is!
It is also useful to extract larger pieces of a string than a single character. That brings us to slices. Try this expression using slice notation, continuing in the Shell:
s[0:4]
Note that s[4] is the first character past the slice. The simplest syntax for a slice of a string s is:
s[startIndex : pastIndex]
This refers to the substring of s starting at index startIndex and stopping just before index pastIndex. It confuses
many people that the index after the colon is not the index of the final character in the slice, but that is the system.
Predict and try each line individually in the Shell:
s[2:5]
s[1:3]
If you omit the first index, the slice starts from the beginning. If you omit the second index, the slice goes all the way to the end. Predict and try each line individually in the Shell:
s[:3]
s[5:]
Predict and try each line individually in the Shell:
word = 'program'
word[2:4]
word[1:-3]
word[3:]
word[3:3]
word[:1] + word[4:]
Python evaluates slices in a more forgiving manner than when indexing single characters. In a slice, if you give an index past a limit of where it could be, Python assumes you mean the actual end. Predict and try each line individually in the Shell:
word[:9]
word[8:10]
Enter a slice expression using the variable word from above that produces 'gra'.
A useful string method that uses the ideas of indices and slices is find.
Syntax options for find:
s.find(sub)
s.find(sub, start)
s.find(sub, start, end)
Return the integer index in the string s of the beginning of first complete occurrence of the substring sub. If sub does not appear inside s, return -1. The value -1 would be an impossible result if sub were found, so if -1 is returned, sub must not have been found. If parameters start and end are not included in the parameter list, the search is through the whole string s. If an integer value is given for start, the search starts at index start. If an integer value is given for end, the search ends before index end. In other words if start and end appear, then the search is through the slice s[start : end], but the index returned is still counted from the beginning of s.
For example, check that the following make sense. The comment line is just there to help you count:
>>> # 01234567890
>>> s = 'Mississippi'
>>> s.find('i')
1
>>> s.find('si')
3
>>> s.find('sa')
-1
>>> s.find('si', 4)
6
Predict and try each line in the Shell:
# 0123456789012
line = 'Hello, there!'
line.find('e')
line.find('he')
line.find('e', 10)
line.find('he', 10)
We will consider more string methods later, but we can already do useful things with the ones introduced.
Inside the Shell, you can look up documentation on any of the methods listed with the dir function. Here is a place that you want to refer to the method itself, not invoke the method, so note that you get help for s.find not for s.find(). Assuming you defined the string s in the Shell earlier, try in the Shell
help(s.find)
The Python documentation uses square brackets to indicate optional elements that get a default value if you leave them out. This shortens the syntax descriptions.
If you want method documentation when you do not have a variable of the type created, you can also use the type name. Try in the Shell:
dir(str)
help(str.capitalize)
Indexing and slicing works on any kind of Python sequence, so you can index or slice lists also. Read this Shell session:
>>> vals = [5, 7, 9, 22, 6, 8]
>>> vals[1]
7
>>> vals[-2]
6
>>> vals[1:4]
[7, 9, 22]
Unlike strings, lists are mutable, as you will see in Section 2.2.1. Indices and slices can also be used in assignment statements to change lists, but in this tutorial we not need list indexing, and we will not discuss this subject further.
All the concrete examples in the last two sections used literal numbers for the indices. That is fine for learning the idea, but in practice, variables or expressions are almost always used for indices. As usual the variable or expression is evaluated before being used. Try in Idle and see that the example program index1.py makes sense:
s = 'word'
print('The full string is: ', s)
n = len(s)
for i in range(n):
print()
print('i =', i)
print('The letter at index i:', s[i])
print('The part before index i (if any):', s[:i])
print('The part before index i+2:', s[:i+2])
We will use index variables in more practical situations as we explain more operations with strings.
Syntax options for the split method with a string s:
s.split()
s.split(sep)
The first version splits s at any sequence of whitespace (blanks, newlines, tabs) and returns the remaining parts of s as a list. If a string sep is specified, it is the separator that gets removed from between the parts of the list.
For example, read and follow:
>>> tale = 'This is the best of times.'
>>> tale.split()
['This', 'is', 'the', 'best', 'of', 'times.']
>>> s = 'Mississippi'
>>> s.split('i')
['M', 'ss', 'ss', 'pp', '']
>>> s.split() # no white space
['Mississippi']
Predict and test each line in the Shell:
line = 'Go: Tear some strings apart!'
seq = line.split()
seq
line.split(':')
line.split('ar')
lines = 'This includes\nsome new\nlines.'
lines.split()
Join is roughly the reverse of split. It joins together a sequence of strings. The syntax is rather different. The separator sep comes first, since it has the right type (a string).
Syntax for the join method:
sep.join(sequence)
Return a new string obtained by joining together the sequence of strings into one string, interleaving the string sep between sequence elements.
For example (continuing in the Shell from the previous section, using seq):
>>> ' '.join(seq)
'Go: Tear some strings apart!'
>>> ''.join(seq)
'Go:Tearsomestringsapart!'
>>> '//'.join(seq)
'Go://Tear//some//strings//apart!'
Predict and try each line, continuing in the Shell:
'##'.join(seq)
':'.join(['one', 'two', 'three'])
The methods split and join are often used in sequence:
Exercise 2.1.6.1. * Write a program underscores.py that would input a phrase from the user and print out the phrase with the white space between words replaced by an underscore. For instance if the input is "the best one", then it would print "the_best_one". The conversion can be done in one or two statements using the recent string methods.
Exercise 2.1.6.2. ** An acronym is a string of capital letters formed by taking the first letters from a phrase. For example, SADD is an acronym for 'students against drunk driving'. Note that the acronym should be composed of all capital letters even if the original words are not. Write a program acronym.py that has the user input a phrase and then prints the corresponding acronym.
To get you started, here are some things you will need to do. First check that you understand the basic syntax to accomplish the different individual tasks: Indicate the proper syntax using a Python function or operation will allow you to accomplish each task. Invent appropriate variable names for the different parts. This is not complete instructions! the idea is to make sure you know the basic syntax to use in all these situations. See the questions after the list to help you put together the final program.
Which of these steps is in a loop? What for statement controls this loop?
Put these ideas together and write and test your program acronym.py. Make sure you use names for the objects that are consistent from one line to the next! (You might not have done that when you first considered the syntax and ideas needed for 1-9 above individually.)
As the dir('') list showed, there are many more operations on strings than we have discussed, and there are further variations of the ones above with more parameters. If you want to reach a systematic reference from inside Idle, go to Help-> Python Docs, select Library Reference, and Section 2.3 Built-in Types, and then Section 2.3.6.1, String Methods. (This depends on you being attached to the Internet, or having idle configured to look at a local copy of the official Python documentation.) Many methods use features we have not discussed yet, but currently accessible methods are capitalize, title, strip, rfind, replace....
The classes and methods introduced here are all used for the revised mad lib program developed in the next section.
Before making a version of the madlib program that is much easier to use with new stories, we need a couple of facts about other types of objects that are built into Python.
So far we have used lists, but we have not changed the contents of lists. The most obvious way to change a list is to add a new element onto the end. Lists have the method append. It modifies the original list. Another word for modifiable is mutable. Lists are mutable. Most of the types of object considered so far (int, str, float) are immutable or not mutable. Read and see how the list named words changes:
>>> words = list()
>>> words
[]
>>> words.append('animal')
>>> words
['animal']
>>> words.append('food')
>>> words
['animal', 'food']
>>> words.append('city')
>>> words
['animal', 'food', 'city']
This is particularly useful in a loop, where we can accumulate a new list. Read the start of this simple example:
def multipleAll(numList, multiplier):
'''Return a new list containing all of the elements of numList,
each multiplied by multiplier. For example:
>>> print(multipleAll([3, 1, 7], 5))
[15, 5, 35]
'''
# more to come
Clearly this will be repetitious. We will process each element of the list numList. A for-each loop with numList is
appropriate. Also we need to create more and more elements of the new list. The accumulation pattern will work
here, with a couple of wrinkles.
Test yourself : If we are going to accumulate a list. How do we initialize the list?
In earlier versions of the accumulation loop, we needed an assignment statement to change the object doing the accumulating, but now the method append modifies its list automatically, so we do not need an assignment statement. Read and try the example program multiply.py:
def multipleAll(numList, multiplier): #1
'''Return a new list containing all of the elements of numList,
each multiplied by multiplier. For example:
>>> print(multipleAll([3, 1, 7], 5))
[15, 5, 35]
'''
newList = list() #2
for num in numList: #3
newList.append(num*multiplier) #4
return newList #5
print(multipleAll([3, 1, 7], 5)) #6
Make sure the result makes sense to you or follow the details of playing computer below.
| Line | numList | multiplier | newList | num | comment |
| 1-5 | - | - | - | - | definition |
| 6 | - | - | - | - | call function |
| 1 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | - | set formal parameters | |
| 2 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [] | ||
| 3 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [] | 3 | first in list |
| 4 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15] | 3 | append 3*5 = 15 |
| 3 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15] | 1 | next in list |
| 4 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15, 5] | 1 | append 1*5 = 5 |
| 3 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15, 5] | 7 | last in list |
| 4 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15, 5, 35] | 7 | append 7*5 = 35 |
| 3 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15, 5, 35] | 7 | done with list and loop |
| 5 | [3, 1, 7 | 5 | [15, 5, 35] | 7 | return [15, 5, 35] |
| 6 | - | - | - | - | print [15, 3, 35] |
Using a for-loop and append is a powerful and flexible way to derive a new list, but not the only way.4
A list may contain duplicates, as in [2, 1, 3, 2, 5, 5, 2]. This is sometimes useful, and sometimes not. You may have learned in math class that a set is a collection that does not allow repetitions (a set automatically removes repetitions suggested). Python has a type set. Like many type names, it can be used to convert other types. In this case it makes sense to convert any collection, and the process removes duplicates.Read and see what happens:
>>> numberList = [2, 1, 3, 2, 5, 5, 2]
>>> aSet = set(numberList)
>>> aSet
{1, 2, 3, 5}
Set literals are enclosed in braces. Like other collections, a set can be used as a sequence in a for-loop. Read, and check it makes sense:
>>> for item in aSet:
print(item)
1
2
3
5
Predict the result of the following, and then paste it into the Shell and test. (Technically, a set is unordered, so you may not guess Python's order, but see if you can get the right length and the right elements in some order.)
set(['animal', 'food', 'animal', 'food', 'food', 'city'])
We have now seen several examples of the name of a type being used as a function. Read these earlier examples:
x = int('123')
s = str(123)
nums = list()
aSet = set(numberList)
In all such cases a new object of the specified type is constructed and returned, and such functions are called constructors.
The versions so far of the Mad Lib program have been fairly easy to edit to contain a different mad lib:
The first is a creative process. The second is a pretty mechanical process of looking at the story string and copying out the embedded cues. The first is best left to humans. The second can be turned over to a Python function to do automatically, as many times as we like, with any story – if we write it once.
Writing the Python code also takes a different sort of creativity! We shall illustrate a creative process. This is a bigger problem than any we have taken on so far. It is hard to illustrate a creative process if the overall problem is too simple.
Try and follow along. Read the sample code and pseudocode.
There is nothing to try in the Shell or editor until further notice.
If we follow the last version of the mad lib program, we had a loop iterating through the keys in the story, and making a dictionary entry for each key. The main idea we follow here is to use the format string to automatically generate the sequence of keys. Let us plan this unified task as a new function:
def getKeys(formatString):
'''formatString is a format string with embedded dictionary keys.
Return a list containing all the keys from the format string.'''
# more to come
The keys we want are embedded like {animal}. There may be any number of them in the format string. This indeterminacy suggests a loop to extract them. At this point we have only considered for-loops. There is no obvious useful sequence to iterate through in the loop (we are trying to create such a sequence). The only pattern we have discussed that does not actively process each element of a significant list is a repeat-loop, where we just use the loop to repeat the correct number of times. This will work in this case.
First: how many times do we want to pull out a key – once for each embedded format. So how do we count those?
The count method is obviously a way to count. However we must count a fixed string, and the whole embedded formats vary (with different keys in the middle. A common part is '{', and this should not appear in the regular text of the story, so it will serve our purpose:
repetitions = formatString.count('{')
for i in range(repetitions):
...
This is certainly the most challenging code to date. Before jumping into writing it all precisely, we can give an overall plan in pseudo-code. For a plan we need an idea of what quantities we are keeping track of, and name them, and outline the sequence of operations with them.
Think about data to name:
In this case we are trying to find a list. We will need to extract one element at a time and add it to the list, so we need a list, say keyList.
The central task is to identifying the individual keys. When we find a key we can call it key.
Think about identifying the text of individual keys. This may be too hard to think of in the abstract, so let us use as a concrete example, and let us keep it simple for the moment. Suppose the data in formatString starts off as follows. The lines with numbers are added to help us refer to the indices. Display of possible data:
# 1111111111222222222233333333
# 01234567890123456789012345678901234567
'blah {animal} blah blah {food} ...'
The first key is 'animal' at formatString[6:12]. The next key is 'food' at formatString[25:29]. To identify each key as part of formatString we need not only the variable formatString, but also index variables to locate the start and end of the slices. Obvious names for the indices are start and end. We want to keep them current so the next key slice will always be
key = formatString[start : end]
Let us now put this all in an overall plan. We will have to continuously modify the start and end indices, the key, and the list. We have a basic pattern for accumulating a list, involving initializing it and appending to it. We can organize a plan, partly fleshed out, with a couple of approximations to be worked out still. The parts that are not yet in Python are emphasized:
def getKeys(formatString):
keyList = list()
?? other initializations ??
repetitions = formatString.count('{')
for i in range(repetitions):
find the start and end of the next key
key = formatString[start : end]
keyList.append(key)
return keyList
We can see that the main piece left is to find the start and end indices for each key. The important word is find: the method we consider is find. As with the plan for using count above, the beginnings of keys are identified by the specific string '{'. We can look first at
formatString.find('{')
but that is not the full solution. If we look at our concrete example, the value returned is 5, not 6. How in general would we locate the beginning of the slice we want?
We do not want the position of the beginning of '{', but the position just after the '{'. Since the length of '{' is 1, the correct position is 5+1 = 6. We can generalize this to
start = formatString.find('{') + 1
OK, what about end? Clearly it is at the '}'. In this example,
formatString.find('}')
gives us 12, exactly the right place for the end of the slice (one place past the actual end).
There is a subtle issue here that will be even more important later: We will kep wanting to find the next brace,a dn not keep finding the first brace. How do we fix that?
Recall there was an alternate syntax for find, specifying the first place to search! That is what we need. Where should we start? Well, the end must come after the start of the key, our variable start:
start = formatString.find('{') + 1
end = formatString.find('}', start)
Figuring out how to find the first key is important, but we are not home free yet. We need to come up with code that works in a loop for the later keys. This code will not work for the next one. Why?
The search for '{' will again start from the beginning of the format string, and will find the first key again. So what code will work for the second search? We search for the start of the next key going from the end of the last one:
start = formatString.find('{', end) + 1
end = formatString.find('}', start)
This code will also work for later times through the loop: each time uses the end from the previous time through the loop.
So now what do we do for finding the first key? We could separate the treatment of the first key from all the others, but an easier approach would be to see if we can use the same code that already works for the later repetitions, and initialize variables right to make it work. If we are to find the first key with
start = formatString.find('{', end) + 1
then what do we need? Clearly end needs to have a value. (There will not be a previous loop to give it a value.) What value should we initialize it to? The first search starts from the beginning of the string at index 0, so the full code for this function is
def getKeys(formatString):
'''formatString is a format string with embedded dictionary keys.
Return a list containing all the keys from the format string.'''
keyList = list()
end = 0
repetitions = formatString.count('{')
for i in range(repetitions):
start = formatString.find('{', end) + 1
end = formatString.find('}', start)
key = formatString[start : end]
keyList.append(key)
return keyList
Look the code over and see that it makes sense. See how we continuously modify start, end, key, and keyList. Since we have coded this new part as a function, it is easy to test without running a whole revised mad lib program. We can just run this function on some test data, like the original story, and see what it does. Run the example program testGetKeys.py:
def getKeys(formatString):
'''formatString is a format string with embedded dictionary keys.
Return a list containing all the keys from the format string.'''
keyList = list()
end = 0
repetitions = formatString.count('{')
for i in range(repetitions):
start = formatString.find('{', end) + 1
end = formatString.find('}', start)
key = formatString[start : end]
keyList.append(key)
return keyList
originalStory = """
Once upon a time, deep in an ancient jungle,
there lived a {animal}. This {animal}
liked to eat {food}, but the jungle had
very little {food} to offer. One day, an
explorer found the {animal} and discovered
it liked {food}. The explorer took the
{animal} back to {city}, where it could
eat as much {food} as it wanted. However,
the {animal} became homesick, so the
explorer brought it back to the jungle,
leaving a large supply of {food}.
The End
"""
print(getKeys(originalStory))
The functions should behave as advertised.
Look back on the process described to come up with the getKeys function. One way of approaching the creative process of coding this function was provided. There are many other results and approaches possible, but the discussion did illustrate a number of useful ideas which you might adapt to other problems, in different orders and proportions, that are summarized in the next section.
There is still an issue for use of getKeys in the mad lib program: the returned list has repetitions in it, that we do not want in the mad lib program. We can easily create a collection without repetitions, how?
One approach is to make a set from the list returned. A neater approach would be to just have the getKeys function return a set in the first place. We need to slightly change to getKeys' documentation string and the final return line. This will be included in a new version of the mad lib program, which makes it easy to substitute a new story. We will make the story's format string be a parameter to the central method, tellStory. We will also put the clearly identified step of filling the dictionary with the user's picks in a separate function. We will test tellStory with the original story. Note the changes included in madlib2.py and run:
"""
madlib2.py
Interactive display of a mad lib, which is provided as a Python format string,
with all the cues being dictionary formats, in the form {cue}.
In this version, the cues are extracted from the story automatically,
and the user is prompted for the replacements.
Original mad lib adapted from code of Kirby Urner
"""
def getKeys(formatString): # change: returns a set
'''formatString is a format string with embedded dictionary keys.
Return a set containing all the keys from the format string.'''
keyList = list()
end = 0
repetitions = formatString.count('{')
for i in range(repetitions):
start = formatString.find('{', end) + 1
end = formatString.find('}', start)
key = formatString[start : end]
keyList.append(key) # may add duplicates
return set(keyList) # removes duplicates: no duplicates in a set
def addPick(cue, dictionary): # from madlib.py
'''Prompt the user and add one cue to the dictionary.'''
prompt = 'Enter an example for ' + cue + ': '
dictionary[cue] = input(prompt)
def getUserPicks(cues):
'''Loop through the collection of cue keys and get user choices.
Return the resulting dictionary.
'''
userPicks = dict()
for cue in cues:
addPick(cue, userPicks)
return userPicks
def tellStory(story):
'''story is a format string with Python dictionary references embedded,
in the form {cue}. Prompt the user for the mad lib substitutions
and then print the resulting story with the substitutions.
'''
cues = getKeys(story)
userPicks = getUserPicks(cues)
print(story.format(**userPicks))
def main():
originalStory = '''
Once upon a time, deep in an ancient jungle,
there lived a {animal}. This {animal}
liked to eat {food}, but the jungle had
very little {food} to offer. One day, an
explorer found the {animal} and discovered
it liked {food}. The explorer took the
{animal} back to {city}, where it could
eat as much {food} as it wanted. However,
the {animal} became homesick, so the
explorer brought it back to the jungle,
leaving a large supply of {food}.
The End
'''
tellStory(originalStory)
main()
Does the use of well-named functions make it easier to follow this code? Make sure you follow the flow of execution and data.
After Python file manipulation is introduced, in Exercise 2.5.0.3you can modify the program to work on a madlib format string chosen by the user and taken from a file.
Exercise 2.3.3.1. ** Rename the example file locationsStub.py to be locations.py, and complete the function printLocations, to print the index of each location in the string s where target is located. For example, printLocations('This is a dish', 'is') would go through the string 'This is a dish' looking for the index of places where 'is' appears, and would return [2, 5, 11]. Similarly printLocations('This is a dish', 'h') would return [1, 13]. The program stub already uses the string method count. You will need to add code using the more general form of find.
Graphics make programming more fun for many people. To fully introduce graphics would involve many ideas that would be a distraction now. This section introduces a simplified graphics module developed by John Zelle for use with his Python Programming book. My slight elaboration of his package is graphics.py in the example programs.
Repeated caution: In Windows XP or Vista, be sure to start Idle from the shortcut provided in the examples (in the same directory as graphics.py). Do not start by clicking on an existing file to get a context menu and choosing Open With Idle: The 'Open With Idle' allows you to edit, but then when you go to run your graphics program, it fails miserably and with no clear reason.
Make sure you have Idle started from inside your Python folder, and have graphics.py in the same folder, so the Python interpreter can find it.
Note: you will just be a user of the graphics.py code, so you do not need to understand the inner workings! It uses all sorts of features of Python that are way beyond these tutorials. There is no particular need to open graphics.py in the Idle editor.
You will definitely want to be a user of the graphical module.
In Idle, in the Shell, enter the following lines, one at a time and read the explanations:
from graphics import *
Zelle's graphics are not a part of the standard Python distribution. For the Python interpreter to find Zelle's module, it must be imported. The line above makes all the types of object of Zelle's module accessible, as if they were already defined like built-in types str or list.
Pause after you enter the opening parenthesis below:
win = GraphWin(
The Idle editor tries to help you by displaying a pop-up tool tip with the parameter names and sometimes a default value after an equal sign. The default value is used if you supply nothing. In this case we will use the default values, so you can just finish by entering the closing parenthesis, now, completing
win = GraphWin()
Look around on your screen, and possibly underneath other windows: There should be a new window labeled “Graphics Window”. Bring it to the top, and preferably drag it around to make it visible beside your Shell window. A GraphWin is a type of object from Zelle's graphics package that automatically displays a window when it is created. The assignment statement remembers the window object as win for future reference. (This will be our standard name for our graphics window object.) A small window, 200 by 200 pixels is created. A pixel is the smallest little square that can by displayed on your screen. Modern screen usually have more than 1000 pixels across the whole screen.
Again, pause after entering the opening parenthesis below, and see how Idle hints at the meaning of the parameters to create a Point object. Then complete the line as given below:
pt = Point(100, 50)
This creates a Point object and assigns it the name pt. Unlike when a GraphWin is created, nothing is immediately displayed: In theory you could have more than one GraphWin. Zelle designed the graphics module so you must tell Python into which GraphWin to draw the Point. A Point object, like each of the graphical objects that can be drawn on a GraphWin, has a method5 draw. Enter
pt.draw(win)
Now you should see the Point if you look hard in the Graphics Window - it shows as a single, small, black pixel. Graphics windows have a Cartesian (x,y) coordinate system. The dimensions are initially measured in pixels. The first coordinate is the horizontal coordinate, measured from left to right, so 100 is about half way across the 200 pixel wide window. The second coordinate, for the vertical direction, increases going down from the top of the window by default, not up as you are likely to expect from geometry or algebra class. The coordinate 50 out of the total 200 vertically should be about 1/4 of the way down from the top. We will see later that we can reorient the coordinate system to fit our taste.
Enter both of the lines of code
cir = Circle(pt, 25)
cir.draw(win)
The first line creates a Circle object with center at the previously defined pt and with radius 25. This object is remembered with the name cir. As with all graphics objects that may be drawn within a GraphWin, it is only made visible by explicitly using its draw method:
So far, everything has been drawn in the default color black. Graphics objects like a Circle have methods to change their colors. Basic color name strings are recognized. You can choose the color for the circle outline as well as filling in the inside. Enter both lines
cir.setOutline("red")
cir.setFill("blue")
Now add
line = Line(pt, Point(150, 100))
line.draw(win)
A Line object is constructed with two Points as parameters. In this case we use the previously named Point, pt, and specify another Point directly. Technically the Line object is a segment between the the two points.
A rectangle is also specified by two points. The points must be diagonally opposite corners. Try
rect = Rectangle(Point(20, 10), pt)
rect.draw(win)
You can move objects around in a GraphWin. This will be handy for animation, shortly. The parameters to the move method are the amount to shift the x and y coordinates. See if you can guess the result before you enter:
line.move(10, 40)
Did you remember that the y coordinate increases down the screen?
Feel free to further modify the graphics window using the methods introduced. To do this in a more systematic and easily reproduced way, we will shortly switch to program files, but then you do not get to see the effect of each statement individually and immediately!
Take your last look at the Graphics Window, and make sure that all the steps make sense. Then destroy the window win with the GraphWin method close:
win.close()
An addition I have made to Zelle's package is the ability to print a string value of graphics objects for debugging purposes. Assuming you downloaded graphics.py from the hands-on site (not Zelle's), continue in the Shell with
print(line)
If some graphics object isn't visible because it is underneath something else of off the screen, this sort of output might be a good reality check.
Here is a very simple program, face.py. The only interaction is to click the mouse to close the graphics window. Have a directory window open to the Python examples folder containing face.py. In Windows you can double click on the icon for face.py to run it.
After you have checked out the picture, click with the mouse inside the picture, as requested, to terminate the program.
After you have run the program, you can examine the program in Idle or look below. The whole program is shown first; smaller pieces of it are discussed later:
'''A simple graphics example constructs a face from basic shapes.
'''
from graphics import *
def main():
winWidth = 200 # give a name to the window width
winHeight = 150 # and height
win = GraphWin('Face', winWidth, winHeight) # give title and dimensions
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight) # make right side up coordinates!
head = Circle(Point(40,100), 25) # set center and radius
head.setFill("yellow")
head.draw(win)
eye1 = Circle(Point(30, 105), 5)
eye1.setFill('blue')
eye1.draw(win)
eye2 = Line(Point(45, 105), Point(55, 105)) # set endpoints
eye2.setWidth(3)
eye2.draw(win)
mouth = Oval(Point(30, 90), Point(50, 85)) # set corners of bounding box
mouth.setFill("red")
mouth.draw(win)
message = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.')
message.draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Let us look at individual parts.
Until further notice the set-off code is for you to read and have explained.
Immediately after the documentation string, always have the import line in your graphics program, to allow easy access to the graphics.py module:
from graphics import *
Though not a graphics issue, the first two lines of the main method illustrate a very good practice:
winWidth = 200 # give a name to the window width
winHeight = 150 # and height
Important parameters for your programs should get names. Within the program the names will make more sense to the human user than the literal data values. Plus, in this program, these parameters are used several times. If I choose to change the window size to 400 by 350, I only need to change the value of each dimension in one place!
win = GraphWin('Face', winWidth, winHeight) # give title and dimensions
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight) # make right side up coordinates!
The first line shows the more general parameters for constructing a new GraphWin, a window title and dimensions in pixels. The second line shows how to turn the coordinate system right-side-up, so the y coordinate increases up the screen. The setCoords method sets up a new coordinate system, where the first two numbers are the coordinates you wish to use for the lower left corner of the window, and the last two numbers are the coordinates of the upper right corner. Thereafter, all coordinates are given in the new coordinate system, and the graphics module silently calculates the correct underlying pixel positions. All the lines of code up to this point in the program are my standard graphics program starting lines (other than the specific values for the title and dimensions). You will likely start your programs with similar code.
head = Circle(Point(40,100), 25) # set center and radius
head.setFill("yellow")
head.draw(win)
eye1 = Circle(Point(30, 105), 5)
eye1.setFill('blue')
eye1.draw(win)
The lines above create two circles, in each case specifying the centers directly. They are filled in and made visible.
eye2 = Line(Point(45, 105), Point(55, 105)) # set endpoints
eye2.setWidth(3)
eye2.draw(win)
The code above draws and displays a line, and illustrates another method available to graphics object, setWidth, making a thicker line.
mouth = Oval(Point(30, 90), Point(50, 85)) # set corners of bounding box
mouth.setFill("red")
mouth.draw(win)
The code above illustrates another kind of graphics object, an Oval (or ellipse). There are several ways an oval could be specified. Zelle chose to have you specify the corners of the bounding box that is just as high and as wide as the oval. This rectangle is only imagined, not actually drawn. (If you want to see such a rectangle, create a Rectangle object with the same two Points as paramaeters..)
The exact coordinates for the parts were determined by a number of trial-and-error refinements to the program. An advantage of graphics is that you can see the results of your programming, and make changes if you do not like the results!
The final action is to have the user signal to close the window. Just as with waiting for keyboard input from input or input, it is important to prompt the user before waiting for a response! In a GraphWin, the prompt must be made with a Text object displayed explicitly before the response is expected. Lines like the following will often end a program that has a final displayed picture:
message = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.')
message.draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
The parameters to construct the Text object are the point at the center of the text, and the text string itself. See how the text position is set up to be centered from left to right, half way across the window's width. Also note, that because the earlier win.setCoord call put the coordinates in the normal orientation, the y coordinate, 20, is close to the bottom of the window.
After the first two lines draw the promping text, the line win.getMouse() waits for a mouse click. In this program, the position is not important. (In the next example the position of this mouse click will be used.) As you have seen before, win.close() closes the graphics window.
While our earlier text-based Python programs have automatically terminated after the last line finishes executing, that is not true for programs that create new windows: The graphics window must be explicitly closed. The win.close() is necessary.
You can copy the form of this program for other simple programs that just draw a picture. The size and title on the window will change, as well as the specific graphical objects, positions, and colors. Something like the last four lines can be used to terminate the program.
Another simple drawing example is balloons.py. Feel free to run it and look at the code in Idle. Note that the steps for the creation of all three balloons are identical, except for the location of the center of each balloon, so a loop over a list of the centers makes sense.
The next example, triangle.py, illustrates similar starting and ending code. In addition it explicitly interacts with the user. Rather than the code specifying literal coordinates for all graphical objects, the program remembers the places where the user clicks the mouse, and uses them as the vertices of a triangle.
Return to the directory window for the Python examples. In Windows you can double click on the icon for triangle.py to run it.
While running the program, follow the prompts in the graphics window and click with the mouse as requested.
After you have run the program, you can examine the program in Idle or look below:
'''Program: triangle.py or triangle.pyw (best name for Windows)
Interactive graphics program to draw a triangle,
with prompts in a Text object and feedback via mouse clicks.
Illustrates all of the most common GraphWin methods, plus
some of the ways to change the appearance of the graphics.
'''
from graphics import *
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin('Draw a Triangle', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight) # make right-side-up coordinates!
win.setBackground('yellow')
message = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click on three points')
message.draw(win)
# Get and draw three vertices of triangle
p1 = win.getMouse()
p1.draw(win)
p2 = win.getMouse()
p2.draw(win)
p3 = win.getMouse()
p3.draw(win)
vertices = [p1, p2, p3]
triangle = Polygon(vertices)
triangle.setFill('gray')
triangle.setOutline('cyan')
triangle.setWidth(4) # width of boundary line
triangle.draw(win)
# Wait for a final click to exit
message.setText('Click anywhere to quit.')
message.setTextColor('red')
message.setStyle('italic')
message.setSize(20)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Let us look at individual parts.
Until further notice the set-off code is for you to read and have explained.
The lines before
win.setBackground('yellow')
are standard starting lines (except for the specific values chosen for the width, height, and title). The background color is a property of the whole graphics window that you can set. The line above illustrates the last new common method of a GraphWin.
message = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click on three points')
message.draw(win)
Again a Text object is created. We will see below how the Text object can be modified later. This is the prompt for user action, expected for use in the lines
# Get and draw three vertices of triangle
p1 = win.getMouse()
p1.draw(win)
p2 = win.getMouse()
p2.draw(win)
p3 = win.getMouse()
p3.draw(win)
The win.getMouse() method (with no parameters), waits for you to click the mouse inside win. Then the Point where the mouse was clicked is returned. In this code three mouse clicks are waited for, remembered in variables p1, p2, and p3, and the points are drawn.
Next we introduce a very versatile type of graphical object, a Polygon, which may have any number of vertices specified in a list as its parameter. We see that the methods setFill and setOutline that we used earlier on a Circle, and the setWidth method available for a Line, also apply to a Polygon, (and also to other graphics objects).
vertices = [p1, p2, p3]
triangle = Polygon(vertices)
triangle.setFill('gray')
triangle.setOutline('cyan')
triangle.setWidth(4)
triangle.draw(win)
The next few lines illustrate most of the ways a Text object may be modified. Not only may the text string be changed. The appearance may be changed like in most word processors. The reference pages for graphics.py give the details.
# Wait for a final click to exit
message.setText('Click anywhere to quit.')
message.setTextColor('red')
message.setStyle('italic')
message.setSize(20)
After this prompt (with its artificially elaborate styling), we have the standard finishing lines:
win.getMouse()
win.close()
This Windows-specific section is not essential. It does describe how to make some Windows graphical programs run with less clutter.
If you ran the triangle.py program by double clicking its icon under Windows, you might have noticed a console window first appearing, followed by the graphics window. For this program, there was no keyboard input or screen output through the console window, so the console window was unused and unnecessary. In such cases, under Windows, you can change the source file extension from .py to .pyw, suppressing the display of the console window. If you are using windows, check it out.
The distinction is irrelevant inside Idle, which always has its Shell window.
This optional section only looks forward to more elaborate graphics systems than are used in this tutorial.
One limitation of the graphics.py module is that it is not robust if a graphics window is closed by clicking on the standard operating system close button on the title bar. If you close a graphics window that way, you are likely to get a Python error message. On the other hand, if your program creates a graphics window and then terminates abnormally due to some other error, the graphics window may be left orphaned. In this case the close button on the title bar is important: it is the easiest method to clean up and get rid of the window!
This lack of robustness is tied to the simplification designed into the graphics module. Modern graphics environments are event driven. The program can be interrupted by input from many sources including mouse clicks and key presses. This style of programming has a considerable learning curve. In Zelle's graphics package, the complexities of the event driven model are pretty well hidden. If the programmer wants user input, only one type can be specified at a time (either a mouse click in the graphics window via the getMouse method, or via the input or input keyboard entry methods into the Shell window).
Thus far various parts of Zelle's graphics package have been introduced by example. A systematic reference to Zelle's graphics package with the form of all function calls is at http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/graphics/graphics/index.html. We have introduced most of the important concepts and methods.
One special graphics input object type, Entry, will be discussed later. You might skip it for now. Another section of the reference that will not be pursued in the tutorials is the Image class.
Meanwhile you can look at http://mcsp.wartburg.edu/zelle/python/graphics/graphics/index.html. It is important to pay attention to the organization of the reference: Most graphics object share a number of common methods. Those methods are described together, first. Then, under the headings for specific types, only the specialized additional methods are discussed.
Exercise 2.4.5.1. * Make a program scene.py creating a scene with the graphics methods. You are likely to need to adjust the positions of objects by trial and error until you get the positions you want. Make sure you have graphics.py in the same directory as your program.
Exercise 2.4.5.2. * Elaborate your scene program so it becomes changeScene.py, and changes one or more times when you click the mouse (and use win.getMouse()). You may use the position of the mouse click to affect the result, or it may just indicate you are ready to go on to the next view.
Zelle chose to have the constructor for a Rectangle take diagonally opposite corner points as parameters. Suppose you prefer to specify only one corner and also specify the width and height of the rectangle. You might come up with the following function, makeRect, to return such a new Rectangle. Read the following attempt:
def makeRect(corner, width, height):
'''Return a new Rectangle given one corner Point and the dimensions.'''
corner2 = corner
corner2.move(width, height)
return Rectangle(corner, corner2)
The second corner must be created to use in the Rectangle constructor, and it is done above in two steps. Start corner2 from the given corner and shift it by the dimensions of the Rectangle to the other corner. With both corners specified, you can use Zelle's version of the Rectangle constructor.
Unfortunately this is an incorrect argument. Run the example program makeRectBad.py:
'''Program: makeRectBad.py
Attempt a function makeRect (incorrectly), which takes
a takes a corner Point and dimensions to construct a Rectangle.
'''
from graphics import *
def makeRect(corner, width, height): # Incorrect!
'''Return a new Rectangle given one corner Point and the dimensions.'''
corner2 = corner
corner2.move(width, height)
return Rectangle(corner, corner2)
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin('Draw a Rectangle (NOT!)', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight)
rect = makeRect(Point(20, 50), 250, 200)
rect.draw(win)
# Wait for another click to exit
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20),'Click anywhere to quit.')
msg.draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
By stated design, this program should draw a rectangle with one corner at the point (20, 50) and the other corner at (20+250, 50+200) or the point (270, 250), and so the rectangle should take up most of the 300 by 300 window. When you run it however that is not what you see. Look carefully. You should just see one Point toward the upper right corner, where the second corner should be. Since a Rectangle was being drawn, it looks like it is the tiniest of Rectangles, where the opposite corners are at the same point! Hm, well the program did make the corners be the same initially. Recall we set
corner2 = corner
What happens after that?
Read and follow the details of what happens.
We need to take a much more careful look at what naming an object means. A good way to visualize this association between a name and an object is to draw an arrow from the name to the object associated with it. The object here is a Point, which has an x and y coordinate describing its state, so when the makeRect method is started the parameter name corner is associated with the actual parameter, a Point with coordinates (20, 50).
Next, the assignment statement associates the name corner2 with the same object. It is another name, or alias, for the original Point.
The next line,
corner2.move(width, height)
internally changes or mutates the Point object, and since in this case width is 250 and height is 200, the coordinates of the Point associated with the name corner2 change to 20+250=270 and 50+200=250:
Look! The name corner is still associated with the same object, but that object has changed internally! That is the problem: we wanted to keep the name corner associated with the point with original coordinates, but it has been modified.
The solution is to use the clone method that is defined for all the graphical objects in graphics.py. It creates a separate object, which is a copy with an equivalent state. We just need to change the line
corner2 = corner
to
corner2 = corner.clone()
A diagram of the situation after the cloning is:
Though corner and corner2 refer to points with equivalent coordinates, they do not refer to the same object. Then after
corner2.move(width, height)
we get:
No conflict: corner and corner2 refer to the corners we want. Run the corrected example program, makeRectange.py.
Read this section if you want a deeper understanding of the significance of muable and immutable objects.
This alias problem only came up because a Point is mutable. We had no such problems with the immutable types int or str.
Read and follow the discussion of the following code.
Just for comparison, consider the corresponding diagrams for code with ints that looks superficially similar:
a = 2
b = a
b = b + 3
After the first two lines we have an alias again:
The third line does not change the int object 2. The result of the addition operation refers to a different object, 5, and the name b is assigned to it:
Hence a is still associated with the integer 2 – no conflict.
It is not technically correct to think of b as being the number 2, and then 5, but a little sloppiness of thought does not get you in trouble with immutable types. With mutable types, however, be very careful of aliases. Then it is very important to remember the indirectness: that a name is not the same thing as the object it refers to.
Another mutable type is list. A list can be cloned with the slice notation: [:]. Try the following in the Shell:6
nums1 = [1, 2, 3]
nums2 = nums1[:]
nums2.append(4)
nums1
nums2
Run the example program, backAndForth0.py. The whole program is shown below for convenience. Then each individual new part of the code is discussed individually:
'''Test animation and depth.
'''
from graphics import *
import time
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin('Back and Forth', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight)
rect = Rectangle(Point(200, 90), Point(220, 100))
rect.setFill("blue")
rect.draw(win)
cir1 = Circle(Point(40,100), 25)
cir1.setFill("yellow")
cir1.draw(win)
cir2 = Circle(Point(150,125), 25)
cir2.setFill("red")
cir2.draw(win)
for i in range(46): # animate cir1 to the right
cir1.move(5, 0)
time.sleep(.05)
for i in range(46): # animate cir1 to the left
cir1.move(-5, 0)
time.sleep(.05)
# Wait for a final click to exit
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.').draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Read the discussion below of pieces of the code from the program above. Do not try to execute fragments alone.
There is a new form of import statement:
from graphics import *
import time
The program uses a function from the time module. The syntax used for the time module is actually the safer and more typical way to import a module. As you will see later in the program, the sleep function used from the time module will be referenced as time.sleep(). This tells the Python interpreter to look in the time module for the sleep function.
If we had used the import statement
from time import *
then the sleep function could just be referenced with sleep(). This is obviously easier, but it obscures the fact that the sleep function is not a part of the current module. Also several modules that a program imports might have functions with the same name. With the individual module name prefix, there is no ambiguity. Hence the form import moduleName is actually safer than from moduleName import *.
You might think that all modules could avoid using any of the same function names with a bit of planning. To get an idea of the magnitude of the issue, have a look at the number of modules available to Python. Try the following in the in the Shell (and likely wait a number of seconds):
help('modules')
Without module names to separate things out, it would be very hard to totally avoid name collisions with the enormous number of modules you see displayed, that are all available to Python!
Back to the current example program: The main program starts with standard window creation, and then makes three objects:
rect = Rectangle(Point(200, 90), Point(220, 100))
rect.setFill("blue")
rect.draw(win)
cir1 = Circle(Point(40,100), 25)
cir1.setFill("yellow")
cir1.draw(win)
cir2 = Circle(Point(150,125), 25)
cir2.setFill("red")
cir2.draw(win)
Zelle's reference pages do not mention the fact that the order in which these object are first drawn is significant. If objects overlap, the ones which used the draw method later appear on top. Other object methods like setFill or move do not alter which are in front of which. This becomes significant when cir1 moves. The moving cir1 goes over the rectangle and behind cir2. (Run the program again if you missed that.)
The animation starts with the code for a simple repeat loop:
for i in range(46): # animate cir1 to the right
cir1.move(5, 0)
time.sleep(.05)
This very simple loop animates cir1 moving in a straight line to the right. As in a movie, the illusion of continuous motion is given by jumping only a short distance each time (increasing the horizontal coordinate by 5). The time.sleep function, mentioned earlier, takes as parameter a time in seconds to have the program sleep, or delay, before continuing with the iteration of the loop. This delay is important, because modern computers are so fast, that the intermediate motion would be invisible without the delay. The delay can be given as a decimal, to allow the time to be a fraction of a second.
The next three lines are almost identical to the previous lines, and move the circle to the left (-5 in the horizontal coordinate each time).
for i in range(46): # animate cir1 to the left
cir1.move(-5, 0)
time.sleep(.05)
The window closing lines of this program include a slight shortcut from earlier versions.
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.').draw(win)
The text object used to display the final message only needs to be referred to once, so a variable name is not necessary: The result of the Text object returned by the constructor is immediately used to draw the object. If the program needed to refer to this object again, this approach would not work.
The next example program, backAndForth1.py, it just a slight variation, looking to the user just like the last version. Only the small changes are shown below. This version was written after noticing how similar the two animation loops are, suggesting an improvement to the program: Animating any object to move in a straight line is a logical abstraction well expressed via a function.
The loop in the initial version of the program contained a number of arbitrarily chosen constants, which make sense to turn into parameters. Also, the object to be animated does not need to be cir1, it can be any of the drawable objects in the graphics package. The name shape is used to make this a parameter:
def moveOnLine(shape, dx, dy, repetitions, delay):
for i in range(repetitions):
shape.move(dx, dy)
time.sleep(delay)
Then in the main function the two similar animation loops are reduced to a line for each direction:
moveOnLine(cir1, 5, 0, 46, .05)
moveOnLine(cir1, -5, 0, 46, .05)
Make sure you see these two lines with function calls behave the same way as the two animation loops in the main program of the original version.
Run the next example version, backAndForth2.py. The changes are more substantial here, and the display of the whole program is followed by display and discussion of the individual changes:
'''Test animation of a group of objects making a face.
'''
from graphics import *
import time
def moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy):
''' Move all shapes in shapeList by (dx, dy).'''
for shape in shapeList:
shape.move(dx, dy)
def moveAllOnLine(shapeList, dx, dy, repetitions, delay):
'''Animate the shapes in shapeList along a line.
Move by (dx, dy) each time.
Repeat the specified number of repetitions.
Have the specified delay (in seconds) after each repeat.
'''
for i in range(repetitions):
moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy)
time.sleep(delay)
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin('Back and Forth', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight) # make right side up coordinates!
rect = Rectangle(Point(200, 90), Point(220, 100))
rect.setFill("blue")
rect.draw(win)
head = Circle(Point(40,100), 25)
head.setFill("yellow")
head.draw(win)
eye1 = Circle(Point(30, 105), 5)
eye1.setFill('blue')
eye1.draw(win)
eye2 = Line(Point(45, 105), Point(55, 105))
eye2.setWidth(3)
eye2.draw(win)
mouth = Oval(Point(30, 90), Point(50, 85))
mouth.setFill("red")
mouth.draw(win)
faceList = [head, eye1, eye2, mouth]
cir2 = Circle(Point(150,125), 25)
cir2.setFill("red")
cir2.draw(win)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, 5, 0, 46, .05)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -5, 0, 46, .05)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.').draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Read the following discussion of program parts.
Moving a single elementary shape is rather limiting. It is much more interesting to compose a more complicated combination, like the face from the earlier example face.py. To animate such a combination, you cannot use the old moveOnLine function, because we want all the parts to move together, not one eye all the way across the screen and then have the other eye catch up! A variation on moveOnLine is needed where all the parts move together. We need all the parts of the face to move one step, sleep, and all move again, .... This could all be coded in a single method, but there are really two ideas here:
This suggests two functions. Another issue is how to handle a group of elementary graphics objects. The most basic combination of objects in Python is a list, so we assume a parameter shapeList, which is a list of elementary graphics objects. For the first function, moveAll, just move all the objects in the list one step. Since we assume a list of objects and we want to move each, this suggests a for-each loop:
def moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy):
''' Move all shapes in shapeList by (dx, dy).'''
for shape in shapeList:
shape.move(dx, dy)
Having this function, we can easily write the second function moveAllOnLine, with a simple change from the moveOnLine function, substituting the moveAll function for the line with the move method:
def moveAllOnLine(shapeList, dx, dy, repetitions, delay):
'''Animate the shapes in shapeList along a line.
Move by (dx, dy) each time.
Repeat the specified number of repetitions.
Have the specified delay (in seconds) after each repeat.
'''
for i in range(repetitions):
moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy)
time.sleep(delay)
The code in main to construct the face is the same as in the earlier example face.py. Once all the pieces are constructed and colored, they must be placed in a list, for use in moveAllOnLine:
faceList = [head, eye1, eye2, mouth]
Then, later, the animation uses the faceList to make the face go back and forth:
moveAllOnLine(faceList, 5, 0, 46, .05)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -5, 0, 46, .05)
This version of the program has encapsulated and generalized the moving and animating by creating functions and adding parameters that can be substituted. Again, make sure you see how the functions communicate to make the whole program work. This is an important and non-trivial use of functions.
Run the example program backAndForth3.py.
The final version, backAndForth3.py, uses the observation that the code to make a face embodies one unified idea, suggesting encapsulation inside a function. Once you have encapsulated the code to make a face, we can make several faces! Then the problem with the original code for the face is that all the positions for the facial elements are hard-coded: The face can only be drawn in one position. The full listing of backAndForth3.py below includes a makeFace function with a parameter for the position of the center of the face.
Beneath the listing of the whole program is a discussion of the individual changes:
'''Test animation of a group of objects making a face.
Combine the face elements in a function, and use it twice.
Have an extra level of repetition in the animation.
'''
from graphics import *
import time
def moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy):
''' Move all shapes in shapeList by (dx, dy).'''
for shape in shapeList:
shape.move(dx, dy)
def moveAllOnLine(shapeList, dx, dy, repetitions, delay):
'''Animate the shapes in shapeList along a line.
Move by (dx, dy) each time.
Repeat the specified number of repetitions.
Have the specified delay (in seconds) after each repeat.
'''
for i in range(repetitions):
moveAll(shapeList, dx, dy)
time.sleep(delay)
def makeFace(center, win): #NEW
'''display face centered at center in window win.
Return a list of the shapes in the face.
'''
head = Circle(center, 25)
head.setFill("yellow")
head.draw(win)
eye1Center = center.clone() # face positions are relative to the center
eye1Center.move(-10, 5) # locate further points in relation to others
eye1 = Circle(eye1Center, 5)
eye1.setFill('blue')
eye1.draw(win)
eye2End1 = eye1Center.clone()
eye2End1.move(15, 0)
eye2End2 = eye2End1.clone()
eye2End2.move(10, 0)
eye2 = Line(eye2End1, eye2End2)
eye2.setWidth(3)
eye2.draw(win)
mouthCorner1 = center.clone()
mouthCorner1.move(-10, -10)
mouthCorner2 = mouthCorner1.clone()
mouthCorner2.move(20, -5)
mouth = Oval(mouthCorner1, mouthCorner2)
mouth.setFill("red")
mouth.draw(win)
return [head, eye1, eye2, mouth]
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin('Back and Forth', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight) # make right side up coordinates!
rect = Rectangle(Point(200, 90), Point(220, 100))
rect.setFill("blue")
rect.draw(win)
faceList = makeFace(Point(40, 100), win) #NEW
faceList2 = makeFace(Point(150,125), win) #NEW
stepsAcross = 46 #NEW section
dx = 5
dy = 3
wait = .05
for i in range(3):
moveAllOnLine(faceList, dx, 0, stepsAcross, wait)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -dx, dy, stepsAcross//2, wait)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -dx, -dy, stepsAcross//2, wait)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 20), 'Click anywhere to quit.').draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Read the following discussion of program parts.
As mentioned above, the face construction function allows a parameter to specify where the center of the face is. The other parameter is the GraphWin that will contain the face.
def makeFace(center, win):
then the head is easily drawn, using this center, rather than cir1 with specific center point (40, 100):
head = Circle(center, 25)
head.setFill("yellow")
head.draw(win)
For the remaining Points used in the construction there is the issue of keeping the right relation to the center. This is accomplished much as in the creation of the second corner point in the makeRectange function in Section 2.4.6. A clone of the original center Point is made, and then moved by the difference in the positions of the originally specified Points. For instance, in the original face, the center of the head and first eye were at (40, 110) and (30, 115). That means a shift between the two coordinates of (-10, 5), since 30-40 = -10 and 130-110 = 20.
eye1Center = center.clone() # face positions are relative to the center
eye1Center.move(-10, 5) # locate further points in relation to others
eye1 = Circle(eye1Center, 5)
eye1.setFill('blue')
eye1.draw(win)
The only other changes to the face are similar, cloning and moving Points, rather than specifying them with explicit coordinates.
eye2End1 = eye1Center.clone()
eye2End1.move(15, 0)
eye2End2 = eye2End1.clone()
eye2End2.move(10, 0)
eye2 = Line(eye2End1, eye2End2)
eye2.setWidth(3)
eye2.draw(win)
mouthCorner1 = center.clone()
mouthCorner1.move(-10, -10)
mouthCorner2 = mouthCorner1.clone()
mouthCorner2.move(20, -5)
mouth = Oval(mouthCorner1, mouthCorner2)
mouth.setFill("red")
mouth.draw(win)
Finally, the list of elements for the face must be returned to the caller:
return [head, eye1, eye2, mouth]
Then in the main function, the program creates a face in exactly the same place as before, but using the makeFace function, with the original center of the face Point(40, 100). Now with the makeFace function, with its center parameter, it is also easy to replace the old cir2 with a whole face!
faceList = makeFace(Point(40, 100), win)
faceList2 = makeFace(Point(150,125), win)
The animation section is considerably elaborated in this version.
stepsAcross = 46
dx = 5
dy = 3
wait = .01
for i in range(3):
moveAllOnLine(faceList, dx, 0, stepsAcross, wait)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -dx, dy, stepsAcross//2, wait)
moveAllOnLine(faceList, -dx, -dy, stepsAcross//2, wait)
The unidentified numeric literals that were used before are replaced by named values that easily identify the meaning of each one. This also allows the numerical values to be stated only once, allowing easy modification.
The whole animation is repeated three times by the use of a simple repeat loop.
The animations in the loop body illustrate that the straight line of motion does not need to be horizontal. The second and third lines use a non-zero value of both dx and dy for the steps, and move diagonally.
Make sure you see now how the whole program works together, including all the parameters for the moves in the loop.
By the way, the documentation of the functions in a module you have just run in the Shell is directly available. Try in the Shell:
help(moveAll)
Exercise 2.4.8.1. ** Save backAndForth3.py to the new name backAndForth4.py. Add a triangular nose in the middle of the face in the makeFace function. Like the other features of the face, make sure the position of the nose is relative to the center parameter. Make sure the nose is included in the final list of elements of the face that get returned.
Exercise 2.4.8.2. ** Make a program faces.py that asks the user to click the mouse, and then draws a face at the point where the user clicked. Elaborate this with a simple repeat loop, so a face appears for each of 6 clicks.
Exercise 2.4.8.3. ** Animate two faces moving in different directions at the same time in a program move2Faces.py. You cannot use the moveAllOnLine function. You will have to make a variation of your own. You can use the moveAll function separately for each face. Hint: imagine the old way of making an animated cartoon. If each face was on a separate piece of paper, and you wanted to animate them moving together, you would place them separately, record one frame, move them each a bit toward each other, record another frame, move each another bit toward each other, record another frame, .... In our animations “record a frame” is replaced by a short sleep to make the position visible to the user. Make a loop to incorporate the repetition of the moves.
Read this section if you want to allow the user to enter text directly into a graphics window.
When using a graphics window, the shell window is still available. Keyboard input can be done in the normal text fashion, waiting for a response, and going on after the user presses the enter key. It is annoying to make a user pay attention to two windows, so the graphics module provides a way to enter text inside a graphics window, with the Entry type. The entry is a partial replacement for the input function.
Run the simple example, greet.py, which is copied below:
"""Simple example with Entry objects.
Enter your name, click the mouse, and see greetings.
"""
from graphics import *
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
infoHeight = 15
win = GraphWin("Greeting", winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0,0, winWidth, winHeight)
instructions = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 40),
"Enter your name.\nThen click the mouse.")
instructions.draw(win)
entry1 = Entry(Point(winWidth/2, 200),10)
entry1.draw(win)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 230),'Name:').draw(win) # label for the Entry
win.getMouse() # To know the user is finished with the text.
name = entry1.getText()
greeting1 = 'Hello, ' + name + '!'
Text(Point(winWidth/3, 150), greeting1).draw(win)
greeting2 = 'Bonjour, ' + name + '!'
Text(Point(2*winWidth/3, 100), greeting2).draw(win)
instructions.setText("Click anywhere to quit.")
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
The only part of this with new ideas is:
entry1 = Entry(Point(winWidth/2, 200),10)
entry1.draw(win)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 230),'Name:').draw(win) # label for the Entry
win.getMouse() # To know the user is finished with the text.
name = entry1.getText()
The first line of this excerpt creates an Entry object, supplying its center point and a number of characters to leave space for (10 in this case).
As with other places where input is requested, a separate static label is added.
The way the underlying events are hidden in graphics.py, there is no signal when the user is done entering text in an Entry box. To signal the program, a mouse press is used above. In this case the location of the mouse press is not relevant, but once the mouse press is processed, execution can go on to reading the Entry text. The method name getText is the same as that used with a Text object.
Run the next example, addEntries.py, also copied below:
"""Example with two Entry objects and type conversion.
Do addition.
"""
from graphics import *
def main():
winWidth = 300
winHeight = 300
win = GraphWin("Addition", winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0,0, winWidth, winHeight)
instructions = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 30),
"Enter two numbers.\nThen click the mouse.")
instructions.draw(win)
entry1 = Entry(Point(winWidth/2, 250),25)
entry1.setText('0')
entry1.draw(win)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 280),'First Number:').draw(win)
entry2 = Entry(Point(winWidth/2, 180),25)
entry2.setText('0')
entry2.draw(win)
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 210),'Second Number:').draw(win)
win.getMouse() # To know the user is finished with the text.
numStr1 = entry1.getText()
num1 = int(numStr1)
numStr2 = entry2.getText()
num2 = int(numStr2)
result = "The sum of\n{num1}\nplus\n{num2}\nis {sum}.".format(**locals())
Text(Point(winWidth/2, 110), result).draw(win)
instructions.setText("Click anywhere to quit.")
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
There is not a separate graphical replacement for the input statement, so you only can read strings. With conversions, it is still possible to work with numbers.
Only one new graphical method has been included above:
entry1.setText('0')
Again the same method name is used as with a Text object. In this case I chose not to leave the Entry initially blank. The 0 value also reinforces that a numerical value is expected.
There is also an entry2 with almost identical code. After waiting for a mouse click, both entries are read, and the chosen names emphasizes they are strings. The strings must be converted to integers in order to do arithmetic and display the result.
The almost identical code for the two entries is a strong suggestion that this code could be written more easily with a function. You may look at the identically functioning example program addEntries2.py. The only changes are shown below. First there is a function to create an Entry and a centered static label over it.
def makeLabeledEntry(entryCenterPt, entryWidth, initialStr, labelText, win):
'''Return an Entry object with specified center, width in characters, and
initial string value. Also create a static label over it with
specified text. Draw everything in the GraphWin win.
'''
entry = Entry(entryCenterPt, entryWidth)
entry.setText(initialStr)
entry.draw(win)
labelCenter = entryCenterPt.clone()
labelCenter.move(0, 30)
Text(labelCenter,labelText).draw(win)
return entry
In case I want to make more Entries with labels later, and refer to this code again, I put some extra effort in, making things be parameters even if only one value is used in this program. The position of the label is made 30 units above the entry by using the clone and move methods. Only the Entry is returned, on the assumption that the label is static, and once it is drawn, I can forget about it.
Then the corresponding change in the main function is just two calls to this function:
entry1 = makeLabeledEntry(Point(winWidth/2, 250), 25,
'0', 'First Number:', win)
entry2 = makeLabeledEntry(Point(winWidth/2, 180), 25,
'0', 'Second Number:', win)
These lines illustrate that a statement may take more than one line. In particular, as in the Shell, Python is smart enough to realize that there must be a continuation line if the parentheses do not match.
While I was improving things, I also changed the conversions to integers. In the first version I wanted to emphasize the existence of both the string and integer data as a teaching point, but the num1Str and num2Str variables were only used once, so a more concise way to read and convert the values is to eliminate them:
num1 = int(entry1.getText())
num2 = int(entry2.getText())
Thus far we have only used common color names. In fact there are a very large number of allowed color names, and the abiltity to draw with custom colors.
First, the graphics package is built on an underlying graphics system, Tkinter, which has a large number of color names defined. Each of the names can be used by itself, like 'red', 'salmon' or 'aquamarine' or with a lower intensity by specifying with a trailing number 2, 3, or 4, like 'red4' for a dark red.
Though the ideas for the coding have not all been introduced, it is still informative to run the example program colors.py. As you click the mouse over and over, you see the names and appearances of a wide variety of built-in color names. The names must be place in quotes, but capitalization is ignored.
Custom colors can also be created. To do that requires some understanding of human eyes and color (and the Python tools). The only colors detected directly by the human eyes are red, green, and blue. Each amount is registered by a different kind of cone cell in the retina. As far as the eye is concerned, all the other colors we see are just combinations of these three colors. This fact is used in color video screens: they only directly display these three colors. A common scale to use in labeling the intensity of each of the basic colors (red, green, blue) is from 0 to 255, with 0 meaning none of the color, and 255 being the most intense. Hence a color can be described by a sequence of red, green, and blue intensities (often abbreviated RGB). The graphics package has a function, color_rgb, to create colors this way. For instance a color with about half the maximum red intensity, no green, and maximum blue intensity would be
aColor = color_rgb(128, 0, 255)
Such a creation can be used any place a color is used in the graphics, (i.e. circle.setFill(aColor) ).
Another interesting use of the color_rgb function is to create random colors. Run example program randomCircles.py. The code also is here:
"""Draw random circles.
"""
from graphics import *
import random, time
def main():
win = GraphWin("Random Circles", 300, 300)
for i in range(75):
r = random.randrange(256)
b = random.randrange(256)
g = random.randrange(256)
color = color_rgb(r, g, b)
radius = random.randrange(3, 40)
x = random.randrange(5, 295)
y = random.randrange(5, 295)
circle = Circle(Point(x,y), radius)
circle.setFill(color)
circle.draw(win)
time.sleep(.05)
Text(Point(150, 20), "Click to close.").draw(win)
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Read the fragments of this program and their explanations:
To do random things, the program needs a function from the random module. This example shows that imported modules may be put in a comma separated list:
import random, time
You have already seen the built-in function range. To generate a sequence of all the integers 0, 1, ... 255, you would use
range(256)
This is the full list of possible values for the red, green or blue intensity parameter. For this program we randomly choose any one element from this sequence. Instead of the range function, use the random module's randrange function, as in
r = random.randrange(256)
b = random.randrange(256)
g = random.randrange(256)
color = color_rgb(r, g, b)
This gives randomly selected values to each of r, g, and b, which are then used to create the random color.
I want a random circle radius, but I do not want a number as small as 0, making it invisible. The range and randrange functions both refer to a possible sequence of values starting with 0 when a single parameter is used. It is also possible to add a different starting value as the first parameter. You still must specify a value past the end of the sequence. For instance
range(3, 40)
would refer to the sequence 3, 4, 5, ... , 39 (starting with 3 and not quite reaching 40). Similarly
random.randrange(3, 40)
randomly selects an arbitrary element of range(3, 40).
I use the two-parameter version to select random parameters for a Circle:
radius = random.randrange(3, 40)
x = random.randrange(5, 295)
y = random.randrange(5, 295)
circle = Circle(Point(x,y), radius)
What are the smallest and largest values I allow for x and y? 7
Random values are often useful in games.
Exercise 2.4.12.1. * Write a program ranges.py that uses the range function to produce the sequnce 1, 2, 3, 4, and then print it. Also prompt the user for an integer n and print the sequnce 1, 2, 3, ... , n – including n. Hint: 8 Finally use a simple repeat loop to find and print five randomly chosen numbers from the range 1, 2, 3, ... , n .
This section fits here logically (as an important built-in type of object) but it is not needed for the next chapter, Flow of Control, 3.
Thus far you have been able to save programs, but anything produced during the execution of a program has been lost when the program ends. Data has not persisted past the end of execution. Just as programs live on in files, you can generate and read data files in Python that persist after your program has finished running.
As far as Python is concerned, a file is just a string (often very large!) stored on your file system, that you can read or write gradually or all together.
Open a directory window for your Python program directory. First note that there is no file named sample.txt.
Make sure you have started Idle so the current directory is your Python program directory (for instance in Windows with the downloaded shortcut to Idle).
Run the example program firstFile.py, shown below:
outFile = open('sample.txt', 'w')
outFile.write('My first output file!')
outFile.close()
The first line creates a file object, which links Python to your computer's file system. The first parameter in the file constructor gives the file name, sample.txt. The second parameter indicates how you use the file. The 'w' is short for write, so you will be creating and writing to a file (or if it already existed, destroying the old contents and starting over!). If you do not use any operating system directory separators in the name ('\' or '/' depending on your operating system), then the file will lie in the current directory. The assignment statement gives the python file object the name outFile.
The second line writes the specified string to the file.
The last line is important to clean up. Until this line, this Python program controls the file, and nothing may even be actually written to the file. (Since file operations are thousands of times slower than memory operations, Python buffers data, saving small amounts and writing all at once in larger chunks.) The close line is essential for Python to make sure everything is really written, and to relinquish control of the file. It is a common bug to write a program where you have the code to add all the data you want to a file, but the program does not end up creating a file. Usually this means you forgot to close the file.
Now switch focus and look at a file window for the current directory. You should now see a file sample.txt. You can open it in Idle (or your favorite word processor) and see its contents.
Run the example program nextFile.py, shown below, which has two calls to the write method:
outFile = open('sample2.txt', 'w')
outFile.write('My second output file!
outFile.write('Write some more.')
outFile.close()
Now look at the file, sample2.txt. Open it in Idle. It may not be what you expect! The write method for the file is not quite like a print function. It does not add anything to the file except exactly the data you tell it to write. If you want a newline, you must indicate it explicitly. Recall the newline code \n. Run the example program revisedFile.py, shown below, which adds newline codes:
outFile = open('sample3.txt', 'w')
outFile.write('A revised output file!\n')
outFile.write('Write some more.\n')
outFile.close()
Check the contents of sample3.txt. This manner of checking the file shows it is really in the file system, but the focus in the Tutorial should be on using Python! Run the example program printFile.py, shown below:
inFile = open('sample3.txt', 'r')
contents = inFile.read()
print(contents)
Now you have come full circle: what one Python program has written into the file sample3.txt, another has read and displayed.
In the first line an operating system file (sample3.txt) is associated again with a Python variable name (inFile). The second parameter again gives the mode of operation, but this time it is 'r', short for read. This file, sample3.txt, should already exist, and the intention is to read from it. This is the most common mode for a file, so the 'r' parameter is actually optional.
The read method returns all the file's data as a single string, here assigned to contents. Using the close method is generally optional with files being read. There is nothing to lose if a program ends without closing a file that was being read.9
Exercise 2.5.0.2. Make the following programs in sequence. Be sure to save the programs in the same
directory as where you start the idle shortcut and where you have all the sample text files:
* a. printUpper.py: read the contents of the sample2.txt file and print the contents out in upper case. (This
should use file operations and should work no matter what the contents are in sample2.txt. Do not assume
the particular string written by nextFile.py!)
* b. fileUpper.py: prompt the user for a file name, read and print the contents of the requested file in upper
case.
** c. copyFileUpper: modify fileUpper.py to write the upper case string to a new file rather than printing
it. Have the name of the new file be dynamically derived from the old name by prepending 'UPPER' to
the name. For example, if the user specified the file sample.txt (from above), the program would create
a file UPPERsample.txt, containing 'MY FIRST OUTPUT FILE!'. When the user specifies the file name
stuff.txt, the resulting file would be named UPPERstuff.txt.
Exercise 2.5.0.3. Write madlib3.py, a small modification of madlib2.py, requiring only a modification to the main function of madlib2.py. Your madlib3.py should prompt the user for the name of a file that should contain a madlib format string as text (with no quotes around it). Read in this file and use it as the format string in the tellStory function. This is unlike in madlib2.py, where the story is a literal string coded directly into the program called originalStory. The tellstory function and particularly the getKeys function were developed and described in detail in this tutorial, but for this exercise there is no need to follow their inner workings - you are just a user of the tellstory function (and the functions that it calls). You do not need to mess with the code for the definition of tellStory or any of the earlier supporting functions. The original madlib string is already placed in a file jungle.txt, that is in this format as an example. With the Idle editor, write another madlib format string into a file myMadlib.txt. If you earlier created a file myMadlib.py, then you can easily extract the story from there (without the quotes around it). Test your program both with jungle.txt and your new madlib story file.
The same typographical conventions will be used as in the last summary in Section 1.15.
returns a file object for reading, where nameInFileSystem must be a string referring to an existing file. The file location is relative to the current directory.
'w') returns a file object for writing, where the string nameInFileSystem will be the name of the file. If it did not exist before, it is created. CAUTION: If it did exist before, all previous contents are erased. The file location is relative to the current directory.
is a file opened for reading, and outfile is a file opened for writing, then
returns the entire file contents of the file as a string.
closes the file in the operating system (generally not needed, unless the file is going to be modified later, while your program is still running).
writes the string to the file, with no extra newline.
closes the file in the operating system (important to make sure the whole file gets written and to allow other access to the file).
loop heading :
move all objects a small step in the proper direction
time.sleep(delay).
You have varied the normal forward sequence of operations with functions and for loops. To have full power over your programs, you need two more constructions that changing the flow of control: decisions choosing between alternatives (if statements), and more general loops that are not required to be controlled by the elements of a collection (while loops).
The statements introduced in this chapter will involve tests or conditions. More syntax for conditions will be introduced later, but for now consider simple arithmetic comparisons that directly translate from math into Python. Try each line separately in the Shell
2 < 5
3 > 7
x = 11
x > 10
2*x < x
type(True)
You see that conditions are either True or False (with no quotes). These are the only possible Boolean values (named after 19th century mathematician George Boole). In Python the name Boolean is shortened to the type bool. It is the type of the results of true-false tests.
Run this example program, suitcase.py. Try it at least twice, with inputs: 30 and then 55. As you an see, you get an extra result, depending on the input. The main code is:
weight = float(input('How many pounds does you suitcase weigh? '))
if weight > 50:
print('There is a $25 charge for luggage that heavy.')
print('Thank you for your business.')
The middle two line are an if-statement. It reads pretty much like English. If it is true that the weight is greater than 50, then print the statement about an extra charge. If it is not true that the weight is greater than 50, then don't do the indented part: skip printing the extra luggage charge. In any event, when you have finished with the if-statement (whether it actually does anything or not), go on to the next statement that is not indented under the if. In this case that is the statement printing “Thank you”.
The general Python syntax for a simple if statement is
if condition :
indentedStatementBlock
If the condition is true, then do the indented statements. If the condition is not true, then skip the indented statements.
Another fragment as an example:
if balance < 0:
transfer = -balance
backupAccount = backupAccount - transfer # take enough from the backup acct.
balance = balance + transfer
As with other kinds of statements with a heading and an indented block, the block can have more than one statement. The assumption in the example above is that if an account goes negative, it is brought back to 0 by transferring money from a backup account in several steps.
In the examples above the choice is between doing something (if the condition is True) or nothing (if the condition is False). Often there is a choice of two possibilities, only one of which will be done, depending on the truth of a condition.
Run the example program, clothes.py. Try it at least twice, with inputs: 50, 80. As you can see, you get different results, depending on the input. The main code of clothes.py is:
temperature = float(input('What is the temperature? '))
if temperature > 70:
print('Wear shorts.')
else:
print('Wear long pants.')
print('Get some exercise outside.')
The middle four lines are an if-else statement. Again it is close to English, though you might say “otherwise” instead of “else” (but else is shorter!). There are two indented blocks: One, like in the simple if statement, comes right after the if heading and is executed when the condition in the if heading is true. In the if-else form this is followed by an else: line, followed by another indented block that is only executed when the original condition is false. In an if-else statement exactly one of two possible indented blocks is executed.
A line is also shown outdented next, about getting exercise. Since it is outdented, it is not a part of the if-else statement: It is always executed in the normal forward flow of statements, after the if-else statement (whichever block is selected).
The general Python syntax is
if condition :
indentedStatementBlockForTrueCondition
else:
indentedStatementBlockForFalseCondition
These statement blocks can have any number of statements, and can include about any kind of statement.
All the usual arithmetic comparisons may be made, but many do not use standard mathematical symbolism, mostly
for lack of proper keys on a standard keyboard.
| Meaning | Math Symbol | Python Symbols |
| Less than | < | < |
| Greater than | > | > |
| Less than or equal | ≤ | <= |
| Greater than or equal | ≥ | >= |
| Equals | = | == |
| Not equal | ≠ | != |
There should not be space between the two-symbol Python substitutes.
Notice that the obvious choice for equals, a single equal sign, is not used to check for equality. An annoying second equal sign is required. This is because the single equal sign is already used for assignment in Python, so it is not available for tests. It is a common error to use only one equal sign when you mean to test for equality, and not make an assignment!
Tests for equality do not make an assignment, and they do not require a variable on the left. Any expressions can be tested for equality or inequality (!=). They do not need to be numbers! Predict the results and try each line in the Shell:
x = 5
x
x == 5
x == 6
x
x != 6
x = 6
6 == x
6 != x
'hi' == 'h' + 'i'
'HI' != 'hi'
[1, 2] != [2, 1]
An equality check does not make an assignment. Strings are case sensitive. Order matters in a list.
Try in the Shell:
'a' > 5
When the comparison does not make sense, an Exception is caused.1
Exercise 3.1.4.1. Write a program, graduate.py, that prompts students for how many credits they have. Print whether of not they have enough credits for graduation. (At Loyola University Chicago 128 credits are needed for graduation.)
Exercise 3.1.4.2. Following up on the discussion of the inexactness of float arithmetic in Section 1.14.3, confirm that Python does not consider .1 + .2 to be equal to .3: Write a simple condition into the Shell to test.
Here is another example: Pay with Overtime. Given a person's work hours for the week and regular hourly wage, calculate the total pay for the week, taking into account overtime. Hours worked over 40 are overtime, paid at 1.5 times the normal rate. This is a natural place for a function enclosing the calculation.
Read the setup for the function:
def calcWeeklyWages(totalHours, hourlyWage):
'''Return the total weekly wages for a worker working totalHours,
with a given regular hourlyWage. Include overtime for hours over 40.
'''
The problem clearly indicates two cases: when no more than forty hours are worked or when more than 40 hours are worked. In case more than 40 hours are worked, it is convenient to introduce a variable overtimeHours. You are encouraged to think about a solution before going on and examining mine.
You can try running my complete example program, wages.py, also shown below. The format operation at the end of the main function uses the floating point format (Section 1.14.3) to show two decimal places for the cents in the answer:
def calcWeeklyWages(totalHours, hourlyWage):
'''Return the total weekly wages for a worker working totalHours,
with a given regular hourlyWage. Include overtime for hours over 40.
'''
if totalHours <= 40:
totalWages = hourlyWage*totalHours
else:
overtime = totalHours - 40
totalWages = hourlyWage*40 + (1.5*hourlyWage)*overtime
return totalWages
def main():
hours = float(input('Enter hours worked: '))
wage = float(input('Enter dollars paid per hour: '))
total = calcWeeklyWages(hours, wage)
print('Wages are ${total:.2f}.'.format(**locals()))
main()
Here the input was intended to be numeric, but it could be decimal so the conversion from string was via float, not int.
Below is an equivalent alternative version of the body of calcWeeklyWages, used in wages1.py. It uses just one general calculation formula and sets the parameters for the formula in the if statement. There are generally a number of ways you might solve the same problem!
if totalHours <= 40:
regularHours = totalHours
overtime = 0
else:
overtime = totalHours - 40
regularHours = 40
return hourlyWage*regularHours + (1.5*hourlyWage)*overtime
Often you want to distinguish between more than two distinct cases, but conditions only have two possible results, True or False, so the only direct choice is between two options. As anyone who has played “20 Questions” knows, you can distinguish more cases by further questions. If there are more than two choices, a single test may only reduce the possibilities, but further tests can reduce the possibilities further and further. Since most any kind of statement can be placed in an indented statement block, one choice is a further if statement. For instance consider a function to convert a numerical grade to a letter grade, 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D' or 'F', where the cutoffs for 'A', 'B', 'C', and 'D' are 90, 80, 70, and 60 respectively. One way to write the function would be test for one grade at a time, and resolve all the remaining possibilities inside the next else clause:
def letterGrade(score):
if score >= 90:
letter = 'A'
else: # grade must be B, C, D or F
if score >= 80:
letter = 'B'
else: # grade must be C, D or F
if score >= 70:
letter = 'C'
else: # grade must D or F
if score >= 60:
letter = 'D'
else:
letter = 'F'
return letter
This repeatedly increasing indentation with an if statement as the else block can be annoying and distracting. A preferred alternative in this situation, that avoids all this indentation, is to combine each else and if block into an elif block:
def letterGrade(score):
if score >= 90:
letter = 'A'
elif score >= 80:
letter = 'B'
elif score >= 70:
letter = 'C'
elif score >= 60:
letter = 'D'
else:
letter = 'F'
return letter
The most elaborate syntax for an if statement, if-elif-...-else is indicated in general below:
if condition1 :
indentedStatementBlockForTrueCondition1
elif condition2 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition2
elif condition3 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition3
elif condition4 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition4
else:
indentedStatementBlockForEachConditionFalse
The if, each elif, and the final else line are all aligned. There can be any number of elif lines, each followed by an indented block. (Three happen to be illustrated above.) With this construction exactly one of the indented blocks is executed. It is the one corresponding to the first True condition, or, if all conditions are False, it is the block after the final else line.
Be careful of the strange Python contraction. It is elif, not elseif. A program testing the letterGrade function is in example program grade1.py.
Exercise 3.1.5.1. In Idle, load grade1.py and save it as grade2.py Modify grade2.py so it has an equivalent version of the letterGrade function that tests in the opposite order, first for F, then D, C, .... Hint: How many tests do you need to do? 2 Be sure to run your new version and test with different inputs that test all the different paths through the program.
Exercise 3.1.5.2. Write a program sign.py to ask the user for a number. Print out which category the number is in: 'positive', 'negative', or 'zero'.
Exercise 3.1.5.3. Modify the wages.py or the wages1.py example to create a program wages2.py that assumes people are paid double time for hours over 60. Hence they get paid for at most 20 hours overtime at 1.5 times the normal rate. For example, a person working 65 hours with a regular wage of $10 per hour would work at $10 per hour for 40 hours, at 1.5*$10 for 20 hours of overtime, and 2*$10 for 5 hours of double time, for a total of 10*40 + (1.5*10)*20 + (2*10)*5 = $800. You may find wages1.py easier to adapt than wages.py.
A final alternative for if statements: if-elif-.... with no else. This would mean changing the syntax for if-elif-else above so the final else: and the block after it would be omitted. It is similar to the basic if statement without an else, in that it is possible for no indented block to be executed. This happens if none of the conditions in the tests are true.
With an else included, exactly one of the indented blocks is executed. Without an else, at most one of the indented blocks is executed.
if weight > 120:
print('Sorry, we can not take a suitcase that heavy.')
elif weight > 50:
print('There is a $25 charge for luggage that heavy.')
This if-elif statement only prints a line if there is a problem with the weight of the suitcase.
The power of a language like Python comes largely from the variety of ways basic statements can be combined. In particular, for and if statements can be nested inside each other's indented blocks. For example, suppose you want to print only the positive numbers from an arbitrary list of numbers in a function with the following heading. Read the pieces for now.
def printAllPositive(numberList):
'''Print only the positive numbers in numberList.'''
For example, suppose numberList is [3, -5, 2, -1, 0, 7]. As a human, who has eyes of amazing capacity, you are drawn immediately to the actual correct numbers, 3, 2, and 7, but clearly a computer doing this systematically will have to check every number. That easily suggests a for-each loop starting
for num in numberList:
What happens in the body of the loop is not the same thing each time: some get printed, and for those we will want the statement
print(num)
but some do not get printed, so it may at first seem that this is not an appropriate situation for a for-each loop, but in fact, there is a consistent action required: Every number must be tested to see if it should be printed. This suggests an if statement, with the condition num > 0. Try loading into Idle and running the example program onlyPositive.py, whose code is shown below. It ends with a line testing the function:
def printAllPositive(numberList):
'''Print only the positive numbers in numberList.'''
for num in numberList:
if num > 0:
print(num)
printAllPositive([3, -5, 2, -1, 0, 7])
This idea of nesting if statements enormously expands the possibilities with loops. Now different things can be done at different times in loops, as long as there is a consistent test to allow a choice between the alternatives.
The rest of this section deals with graphical examples.
Run example program bounce1.py. It has a red ball moving and bouncing obliquely off the edges. If you watch several times, you should see that it starts from random locations. Also you can repeat the program from the Shell prompt after you have run the script. For instance, right after running the program, try in the Shell
bounceBall(-3, 1)
The parameters give the amount the shape moves in each animation step. You can try other values in the Shell, preferably with magnitudes less than 10.
For the remainder of the description of this example, read the extracted text pieces.
The animations before this were totally scripted, saying exactly how many moves in which direction, but in this case the direction of motion changes with every bounce. The program has a graphic object shape and the central animation step is
shape.move(dx, dy)
but in this case, dx and dy have to change when the ball gets to a boundary. For instance, imagine the ball getting to the left side as it is moving to the left and up. The bounce obviously alters the horizontal part of the motion, in fact reversing it, but the ball would still continue up. The reversal of the horizontal part of the motion means that the horizontal shift changes direction and therefore its sign:
dx = -dx
but dy does not need to change. This switch does not happen at each animation step, but only when the ball reaches the edge of the window. It happens only some of the time – suggesting an if statement. Still the condition must be determined. Suppose the center of the ball has coordinates (x, y). When x reaches some particular x coordinate, call it xLow, the ball should bounce.
The edge of the window is at coordinate 0, but xLow should not be 0, or the ball would be half way off the screen before bouncing! For the edge of the ball to hit the edge of the screen, the x coordinate of the center must be the length of the radius away, so actually xLow is the radius of the ball.
Animation goes quickly in small steps, so I cheat. I allow the ball to take one (small, quick) step past where it really should go (xLow), and then we reverse it so it comes back to where it belongs. In particular
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
There are similar bounding variables xHigh, yLow and yHigh, all the radius away from the actual edge coordinates, and similar conditions to test for a bounce off each possible edge. Note that whichever edge is hit, one coordinate, either dx or dy, reverses. One way the collection of tests could be written is
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
if x > xHigh
dx = -dx
if y < yLow:
dy = -dy
if y > yHigh
dy = -dy
This approach would cause there to be some extra testing: If it is true that x < xLow, then it is impossible for it to be true that x > xHigh, so we do not need both tests together. We avoid unnecessary tests with an elif clause (for both x and y):
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
elif x > xHigh
dx = -dx
if y < yLow:
dy = -dy
elif y > yHigh
dy = -dy
Note that the middle if is not changed to an elif, because it is possible for the ball to reach a corner, and need both dx and dy reversed.
The program also uses several accessor methods for graphics objects that we have not used in examples yet. Various graphics objects, like the circle we are using as the shape, know their center point, and it can be accessed with the getCenter() method. (Actually a clone of the point is returned.) Also each coordinate of a Point can be accessed with the getX() and getY() methods.
This explains the new features in the central function defined for bouncing around in a box, bounceInBox. The animation arbitrarily goes on in a simple repeat loop for 600 steps. (A later example will improve this behavior.):
def bounceInBox(shape, dx, dy, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh):
''' Animate a shape moving in jumps (dx, dy), bouncing when
its center reaches the low and high x and y coordinates.
'''
delay = .005
for i in range(600):
shape.move(dx, dy)
center = shape.getCenter()
x = center.getX()
y = center.getY()
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
elif x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
if y < yLow:
dy = -dy
elif y > yHigh:
dy = -dy
time.sleep(delay)
The program starts the ball from an arbitrary point inside the allowable rectangular bounds. This is encapsulated in a utility function included in the program, getRandomPoint. The getRandomPoint function uses the randrange function from the module random. Note that in parameters for both the functions range and randrange, the end stated is past the last value actually desired:
def getRandomPoint(xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh):
'''Return a random Point with coordinates in the range specified.'''
x = random.randrange(xLow, xHigh+1)
y = random.randrange(yLow, yHigh+1)
return Point(x, y)
The full program is listed below, repeating bounceInBox and getRandomPoint for completeness. Several parts that may be useful later, or are easiest to follow as a unit, are separated out as functions. Make sure you see how it all hangs together or ask questions!
'''
Show a ball bouncing off the sides of the window.
'''
from graphics import *
import time, random
def bounceInBox(shape, dx, dy, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh):
''' Animate a shape moving in jumps (dx, dy), bouncing when
its center reaches the low and high x and y coordinates.
'''
delay = .005
for i in range(600):
shape.move(dx, dy)
center = shape.getCenter()
x = center.getX()
y = center.getY()
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
elif x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
if y < yLow:
dy = -dy
elif y > yHigh:
dy = -dy
time.sleep(delay)
def getRandomPoint(xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh):
'''Return a random Point with coordinates in the range specified.'''
x = random.randrange(xLow, xHigh+1)
y = random.randrange(yLow, yHigh+1)
return Point(x, y)
def makeDisk(center, radius, win):
'''return a red disk that is drawn in win with given center and radius.'''
disk = Circle(center, radius)
disk.setOutline("red")
disk.setFill("red")
disk.draw(win)
return disk
def bounceBall(dx, dy):
'''Make a ball bounce around the screen, initially moving by (dx, dy)
at each jump.'''
winWidth = 290
winHeight = 290
win = GraphWin('Ball Bounce', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight)
radius = 10
xLow = radius # center is separated from the wall by the radius at a bounce
xHigh = winWidth - radius
yLow = radius
yHigh = winHeight - radius
center = getRandomPoint(xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh)
ball = makeDisk(center, radius, win)
bounceInBox(ball, dx, dy, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh)
win.close()
bounceBall(3, 5)
To be eligible to graduate from Loyola University Chicago, you must have 128 units of credit and a GPA of at least 2.0. This translates directly into Python as a compound condition:
units >= 128 and GPA >=2.0
This is true if both units >= 128 is true and GPA >=2.0 is true. A short example program using this would be:
units = input('How many units of credit do you have? ')
GPA = input('What is your GPA? ')
if units >= 128 and GPA >=2.0:
print('You are eligible to graduate!')
else:
print('You are not eligible to graduate.')
The new Python syntax is for the operator and:
condition1 and condition2
It is true if both of the conditions are true. It is false if at least one of the conditions is false.
Exercise 3.1.7.1. A person is eligible to be a US Senator who is at least 30 years old and has been a US citizen for at least 9 years. Write a version of a program congress.py to obtain age and length of citizenship from the user and print out if a person is eligible to be a Senator or not. A person is eligible to be a US Representative who is at least 25 years old and has been a US citizen for at least 7 years. Elaborate your program congress.py so it obtains age and length of citizenship and prints whether a person is eligible to be a US Representative only, or is eligible for both offices, or is eligible for neither.
In the last example in the previous section, there was an if-elif statement where both tests had the same block to be done if the condition was true:
if x < xLow:
dx = -dx
elif x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
There is a simpler way to state this in a sentence: If x < xLow or x > xHigh, switch the sign of dx. That translates directly into Python:
if x < xLow or x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
The word or makes another compound condition:
condition1 or condition2
is true if at least one of the conditions is true. It is false if both conditions are false. This corresponds to one way the word “or” is used in English. Other times in English “or” is used to mean exactly one alternative is true.
It is often convenient to encapsulate complicated tests inside a function. Think how to complete the function starting:
def isInside(rect, point):
'''Return True if the point is inside the Rectangle rect.'''
pt1 = rect.getP1()
pt2 = rect.getP2()
Recall that a Rectangle is specified in its constructor by two diagonally oppose Points. This example gives the first use in the tutorials of the Rectangle methods that recover those two corner points, getP1 and getP2. The program calls the points obtained this way p1 and p2. The x and y coordinates of pt1, pt2, and point can be recovered with the methods of the Point type, getX() and getY().
Suppose that I introduce variables for the x coordinates of p1, point, and p2, calling these x-coordinates end1, val, and end2, respectively. On first try you might decide that the needed mathematical relationship to test is
end1 <= val <= end2
Unfortunately, this is not enough: The only requirement for the two corner points is that they be diagonally opposite, not that the coordinates of the second point are higher than the corresponding coordinates of the first point. It could be that end1 is 200; end2 is 100, and val is 120. In this latter case val is between end1 and end2, but substituting into the expression above
200 <= 120 <= 100
is False. The 100 and 200 need to be reversed in this case. This makes a complicated situation, and an issue which must be revisited for both the x and y coordinates. I introduce an auxiliary function isBetween to deal with one coordinate at a time. It starts:
def isBetween(val, end1, end2):
'''Return True if val is between the ends.
The ends do not need to be in increasing order.'''
Clearly this is true if the original expression, end1 <= val <= end2, is true. You must also consider the possible case when the order of the ends is reversed: end2 <= val <= end1. How do we combine these two possibilities? The Boolean connectives to consider are and and or. Which applies? You only need one to be true, so or is the proper connective:
A correct but redundant function body would be:
if end1 <= val <= end2 or end2 <= val <= end1:
return True
else:
return False
Check the meaning: if the compound expression is True, return True. If the condition is False, return False – in either case return the same value as the test condition. See that a much simpler and neater version is to just return the value of the condition itself!
return end1 <= val <= end2 or end2 <= val <= end1
In general you should not need an if-else statement to choose between true and false values!
A side comment on expressions like
end1 <= val <= end2
Other than the two-character operators, this is like standard math syntax, chaining comparisons. In Python any number of comparisons can be chained in this way, closely approximating mathematical notation. Though this is good Python, be aware that if you try other high-level languages like Java and C++, such an expression is gibberish. Another way the expression can be expressed (and which translates directly to other languages) is:
end1 <= val and val <= end2
So much for the auxiliary function isBetween. Back to the isInside function. You can use the isBetween function to check the x coordinates, isBetween(point.getX(), p1.getX(), p2.getX()), and to check the y coordinates, isBetween(point.getY(), p1.getY(), p2.getY()). Again the question arises: how do you combine the two tests?
In this case we need the point to be both between the sides and between the top and bottom, so the proper connector is and.
Think how to finish the isInside method. Hint: 3
Sometimes you want to test the opposite of a condition. As in English you can use the word not. For instance, to test if a Point was not inside Rectangle Rect, you could use the condition
not isInside(rect, point)
In general,
not condition
is True when condition is False, and False when condition is True.
The example program chooseButton1.py, shown below, is a complete program using the isInside function in a simple application, choosing colors. Pardon the length. Do check it out. It will be the starting point for a number of improvements that shorten it and make it more powerful in the next section. First a brief overview:
The program includes the functions isBetween and isInside that have already been discussed. The program creates a number of colored rectangles to use as buttons and also as picture components. Aside from specific data values, the code to create each rectangle is the same, so the action is encapsulated in a function, makeColoredRect. All of this is fine, and will be preserved in later versions.
The present main function is long, though. It has the usual graphics starting code, draws buttons and picture elements, and then has a number of code sections prompting the user to choose a color for a picture element. Each code section has a long if-elif-else test to see which button was clicked, and sets the color of the picture element appropriately.
'''Make a choice of colors via mouse clicks in Rectangles --
A demonstration of Boolean operators and Boolean functions.'''
from graphics import *
def isBetween(x, end1, end2): #same as before
'''Return True if x is between the ends or equal to either.
The ends do not need to be in increasing order.'''
return end1 <= x <= end2 or end2 <= x <= end1
def isInside(point, rect):
'''Return True if the point is inside the Rectangle rect.'''
pt1 = rect.getP1()
pt2 = rect.getP2()
return isBetween(point.getX(), pt1.getX(), pt2.getX()) and \
isBetween(point.getY(), pt1.getY(), pt2.getY())
def makeColoredRect(corner, width, height, color, win):
''' Return a Rectangle drawn in win with the upper left corner
and color specified.'''
corner2 = corner.clone()
corner2.move(width, -height)
rect = Rectangle(corner, corner2)
rect.setFill(color)
rect.draw(win)
return rect
def main():
winWidth = 400
winHeight = 400
win = GraphWin('pick Colors', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight)
redButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 350), 80, 30, 'red', win)
yellowButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 310), 80, 30, 'yellow', win)
blueButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 270), 80, 30, 'blue', win)
house = makeColoredRect(Point(60, 200), 180, 150, 'gray', win)
door = makeColoredRect(Point(90, 150), 40, 100, 'white', win)
roof = Polygon(Point(50, 200), Point(250, 200), Point(150, 300))
roof.setFill('black')
roof.draw(win)
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 375),'Click to choose a house color.')
msg.draw(win)
pt = win.getMouse()
if isInside(pt, redButton):
color = 'red'
elif isInside(pt, yellowButton):
color = 'yellow'
elif isInside(pt, blueButton):
color = 'blue'
else :
color = 'white'
house.setFill(color)
msg.setText('Click to choose a door color.')
pt = win.getMouse()
if isInside(pt, redButton):
color = 'red'
elif isInside(pt, yellowButton):
color = 'yellow'
elif isInside(pt, blueButton):
color = 'blue'
else :
color = 'white'
door.setFill(color)
msg.setText('Click anywhere to quit.')
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
The only further new feature used is in the long return statement in isInside.
return isBetween(point.getX(), pt1.getX(), pt2.getX()) and \
isBetween(point.getY(), pt1.getY(), pt2.getY())
Recall that Python is smart enough to realize that a statement continues to the next line if there is an unmatched pair of parentheses or brackets. Above is another situation with a long statement, but there are no unmatched parentheses on a line. For readability it is best not to make an enormous long line that would run off your screen or paper. Continuing to the next line is recommended. You can make the final character on a line be a backslash (\) to indicate the statement continues on the next line. This is not particularly neat, but it is a rather rare situation. Most statements fit neatly on one line, and the creator of Python decided it was best to make the syntax simple in the most common situation. (Many other languages require a special statement terminator symbol like ';' and pay no attention to newlines).
The chooseButton1.py program is long partly because of repeated code. The next section gives another version involving lists.
This section will discuss several improvements to the chooseButton1.py program from the last section that will turn it into example program chooseButton2.py.
First an introduction to tuples, which we will use for the first time in this section:
A tuple is similar to a list except that a literal tuple is enclosed in parentheses rather than square brackets and a tuple is immutable. In particular you cannot change the length or substitute elements, unlike a list. Examples are
(1, 2, 3)
('yes', 'no')
They are another way to make several items into a single object. You can refer to individual parts with indexing, like with lists, but a more common way is with multiple assignment. A silly simple example:
tup = (1, 2)
(x, y) = tup
print(x) # printe 1
print(y) # prints 2
Now back to improving the chooseButton1.py program, which has similar code repeating in several places. Imagine how much worse it would be if there were more colors to choose from and more parts to color!
First consider the most egregious example:
if isInside(pt, redButton):
color = 'red'
elif isInside(pt, yellowButton):
color = 'yellow'
elif isInside(pt, blueButton):
color = 'blue'
else :
color = 'white'
Not only is this exact if statement repeated several times, all the conditions within the if statement are very similar! Part of the reason I did not put this all in a function was the large number of separate variables. On further inspection, the particular variables redButton, yellowButton, blueButton, all play a similar role, and their names are not really important, it is their associations that are important: that redButton goes with 'red', .... When there is a sequence of things all treated similarly, it suggests a list and a loop. An issue here is that the changing data is paired, a rectangle with a color string. There are a number of ways to handle such associations. A very neat way in Python to package a pair (or more things together) is a tuple, turning several things into one object, as in (redButtton, 'red'). Objects such are this tuple can be put in a larger list:
choicePairs = [(redButtton, 'red'), (yellowButton, 'yellow'), (blueButton, 'blue')]
Such tuples may be neatly handled in a for statement. You can imagine a function to encapsulate the color choice starting:
def getChoice(choicePairs, default, win):
'''Given a list choicePairs of tuples, with each tuple in the form
(rectangle, choice), return the choice that goes with the rectangle
in win where the mouse gets clicked, or return default if the click
is in none of the rectangles.'''
point = win.getMouse()
for (rectangle, choice) in choicePairs:
#....
This is the first time we have had a for-loop going through a list of tuples. Recall that we can do multiple assignments at once with tuples. This also works in a for-loop heading. The for-loop goes through one tuple in the list choicePairs at a time. The first time through the loop the tuple taken from the list is (redButtton, 'red'). This for-loop does a multiple assignment to (rectangle, choice)each time through the loop, so the first time rectangle refers to redButton and choice refers to 'red'. The next time through the loop, the second tuple from the list is used, (yellowButton, 'yellow')so this time inside the loop rectangle will refer to yellowButton and choice refers to 'yellow'....This is a neat Python feature.4
There is still a problem. We could test each rectangle in the for-each loop, but the original if-elif... statement in chooseButton1.py stops when the first condition is true. For-each statements are designed to go all the way through the sequence. There is a simple way out of this in a function: A return statement always stops the execution of a function. When we have found the rectangle containing the point, the function can return the desired choice immediately!
def getChoice(choicePairs, default, win):
'''Given a list of tuples (rectangle, choice), return the choice
that goes with the rectangle in win where the mouse gets clicked,
or return default if the click is in none of the rectangles.'''
point = win.getMouse()
for (rectangle, choice) in choicePairs:
if isInside(point, rectangle):
return choice
return default
Note that the else part in chooseButton1.py corresponds to the statement after the loop above. If execution gets past the loop, then none of the conditions tested in the loop was true.
With appropriate parameters, the looping function is a complete replacement for the original if-elif statement! The replacement has further advantages.
Are individual names for the rectangles needed earlier? No, the program only need to end up with the pairs of the form (rectangle, color) in a list. The statements in the original program, below, have a similar form which will allow them to be rewritten:
redButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 350), 80, 30, 'red', win)
yellowButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 310), 80, 30, 'yellow', win)
blueButton = makeColoredRect(Point(310, 270), 80, 30, 'blue', win)
As stated earlier, we could use the statements above and then make a list of pairs with the statement
choicePairs = [(redButtton, 'red'), (yellowButton, 'yellow'), (blueButton, 'blue')]
Now I will look at an alternative that would be particularly useful if there were considerably more buttons and colors.
All the assignment statements with makeColorRect have the same format, but differing data for several parameters. I use that fact in the alternate code:
choicePairs = list()
buttonSetup = [(310, 350, 'red'), (310, 310, 'yellow'), (310, 270, 'blue')]
for (x, y, color) in buttonSetup:
button = makeColoredRect(Point(x, y), 80, 30, color, win)
choicePairs.append((button, color))
I extract the changing data from the creation of the rectangles into a list, buttonSetup. Since more than one data items are different for each of the original lines, the list contains a tuple of data from each of the original lines. Then I loop through this list and not only create the rectangles for each color, but also accumulates the (rectangle, color) pairs for the list choicePairs.
Note the double parentheses in the last line of the code. The outer ones are for the method call. The inner ones create a single tuple as the parameter.
Assuming I do not need the original individual names of the Rectangles, this code with the loop will completely substitute for the previous code with its separate lines with the separate named variables and the recurring formats.
This code has advantages similar to those listed above for the getChoice code.
Now look at what this new code means for the interactive part of the program. The interactive code directly reduces to
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 375),'Click to choose a house color.')
msg.draw(win)
color = getChoice(colorPairs, 'white', win)
house.setFill(color)
msg.setText('Click to choose a door color.')
color = getChoice(colorPairs, 'white', win)
door.setFill(color)
In the original version with the long if-elif statements, the interactive portion only included portions for the user to set the color of two shapes in the picture (or you would have been reading code forever). Looking now at the similarity of the code for the two parts, we can imagine another loop, that would easily allow for many more parts to be colored interactively.
There are still several differences to resolve. First the message msg is created the first time, and only the text is set the next time. That is easy to make consistent by splitting the first part into an initialization and a separate call to setText like in the second part:
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 375),'')
msg.draw(win)
msg.setText('Click to choose a house color.')
Then look to see the differences between the code for the two choices. The shape object to be colored and the name used to describe the shape change: two changes in each part. Again tuples can store the changes of the form (shape, description). This is another place appropriate for a loop driven by tuples.. The (shape, description) tuples should be explicitly written into a list that can be called shapePairs. We could easily extend the list shapePairs to allow more graphics objects to be colored. In the code below, the roof is added.
The new interactive code can start with:
shapePairs = [(house, 'house'), (door, 'door'), (roof, 'roof')]
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 375),'')
msg.draw(win)
for (shape, description) in shapePairs:
prompt = 'Click to choose a + description + ' color.'
# ....
Can you finish the body of the loop? Look at the original version of the interactive code. When you are done thinking about it, go on to my solution. The entire code is in example program chooseButton2.py, and also below. The changes from chooseButton1.py are in three blocks, each labeled #NEW in the code. The new parts are the getChoice function and the two new sections of main with the loops:
'''Make a choice of colors via mouse clicks in Rectangles --
Demonstrate loops using lists of tuples of data.'''
from graphics import *
def isBetween(x, end1, end2):
'''Return True if x is between the ends or equal to either.
The ends do not need to be in increasing order.'''
return end1 <= x <= end2 or end2 <= x <= end1
def isInside(point, rect):
'''Return True if the point is inside the Rectangle rect.'''
pt1 = rect.getP1()
pt2 = rect.getP2()
return isBetween(point.getX(), pt1.getX(), pt2.getX()) and \
isBetween(point.getY(), pt1.getY(), pt2.getY())
def makeColoredRect(corner, width, height, color, win):
''' Return a Rectangle drawn in win with the upper left corner
and color specified.'''
corner2 = corner.clone()
corner2.move(width, -height)
rect = Rectangle(corner, corner2)
rect.setFill(color)
rect.draw(win)
return rect
def getChoice(choicePairs, default, win): #NEW, discussed above
'''Given a list of tuples (rectangle, choice), return the choice
that goes with the rectangle in win where the mouse gets clicked,
or return default if the click is in none of the rectangles.'''
point = win.getMouse()
for (rectangle, choice) in choicePairs:
if isInside(point, rectangle):
return choice
return default
def main():
winWidth = 400
winHeight = 400
win = GraphWin('Pick Colors', winWidth, winHeight)
win.setCoords(0, 0, winWidth, winHeight)
#NEW, shown in the discussion above
choicePairs = list() # elements (button rectangle, color)
buttonSetup = [(310, 350, 'red'), (310, 310, 'yellow'), (310, 270, 'blue')]
for (x, y, color) in buttonSetup:
button = makeColoredRect(Point(x, y), 80, 30, color, win)
choicePairs.append((button, color))
house = makeColoredRect(Point(60, 200), 180, 150, 'gray', win)
door = makeColoredRect(Point(90, 150), 40, 100, 'white', win)
roof = Polygon(Point(50, 200), Point(250, 200), Point(150, 300))
roof.setFill('black')
roof.draw(win)
#NEW started in the discussion above.
shapePairs = [(house, 'house'), (door, 'door'), (roof, 'roof')]
msg = Text(Point(winWidth/2, 375),'')
msg.draw(win)
for (shape, description) in shapePairs:
prompt = 'Click to choose a + description + ' color.'
msg.setText(prompt)
color = getChoice(choicePairs, 'white', win)
shape.setFill(color)
msg.setText('Click anywhere to quit.')
win.getMouse()
win.close()
main()
Run it.
With the limited number of choices in chooseButton1.py, the change in length to convert to chooseButton2.py is not significant, but the change in organization is significant if you try to extend the program, as in the exercise below. See if you agree!
Exercise 3.2.0.2. a. Write a program chooseButton3.py, modifying chooseButton2.py. Look at the format of the list buttonSetup, and extend it so there is a larger choice of buttons and colors. Add at least one button and color.
b. Further extend the program chooseButton3.py by adding some further graphical object shape to the picture, and extend the list shapePairs, so they can all be interactively colored.
c. (Optional) If you would like to carry this further, also add a prompt to change the outline color of each shape, and then carry out the changes the user desires.
d. (Optional Challenge) Look at the pattern within the list buttonSetup. It has a consistent x coordinate, and there is a regular pattern to the change in the y coordinate (a consistent decrease each time). The only data that is arbitrary each time is the sequence of colors. Write a further version chooseButton4.py with a function makeButtonSetup, that takes a list of color names as a parameter and uses a loop to create the list used as buttonSetup. End by returning this list. Use the function to initialize buttonSetup. If you like, make the function more general and include parameters for the x coordinate, the starting y coordinate and the regular y coordinate change.
Other than the trick with using a return statement inside of a for loop, all of the loops so far have gone all the way through a specified list. In any case the for loop has required the use of a specific list. This is often too restrictive. A Python while loop behaves quite similarly to common English usage. If I say
| While your tea is too hot, add a chip of ice. |
while condition :
indentedBlock
Setting up the English example in a similar format would be:
while your tea is too hot :
add a chip of ice
To make things concrete and numerical, suppose the following: The tea starts at 115 degrees Fahrenheit. You want it at 112 degrees. A chip of ice turns out to lower the temperature one degree each time. You test the temperature each time, and also print out the temperature before reducing the temperature. In Python you could write and run the code below, saved in example program cool.py:
temperature = 115 #1
while temperature > 112: #2
print(temperature) #3
temperature = temperature - 1 #4
print('The tea is cool enough.') #5
I added a final line after the while loop to remind you that execution follows sequentially after a loop completes.
If you play computer and follow the path of execution, you could generate the following table. Remember, that
each time you reach the end of the indented block after the while heading, execution returns to the while
heading:
| line | temperature | comment |
| 1 | 115 | |
| 2 | 115 > 112 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | prints 115 | |
| 4 | 114 | 115 - 1 is 114, loop back |
| 2 | 114 > 112 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | prints 114 | |
| 4 | 113 | 114 - 1 is 113, loop back |
| 2 | 113 > 112 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | prints 113 | |
| 4 | 112 | 113 - 1 is 112, loop back |
| 2 | 112 > 112 is false, skip loop | |
| 5 | prints that the tea is cool | |
Each time the end of the indented loop body is reached, execution returns to the while loop heading for another test. When the test is finally false, execution jumps past the indented body of the while loop to the next sequential statement.
A while loop generally follows the pattern of the successive modification loop introduced with for-each loops:
initialization
while continuationCondition:
do main action to be repeated
prepare variables for the next time through the loop
Test yourself: Figure out by following the code, what is printed?
i = 4
while (i < 9):
print(i)
i = i+2
Check yourself by running the example program testWhile.py.
In Python, while is not used quite like in English. In English you could mean to stop as soon as the condition you want to test becomes false. In Python the test is only made when execution for the loop starts, not in the middle of the loop. Predict what will happen with this slight variation on the previous example, switching the order in the loop body. Follow it carefully, one step at a time.
i = 4 #1
while (i < 9): #2
i = i+2 #3
print(i) #4
Check yourself by running the example program testWhile2.py.
The sequence order is important. The variable i is increased before it is printed, so the first number printed is 6.
Another common error is to assume that 10 will not be printed, since 10 is past 9, but the test that may stop the
loop is not made in the middle of the loop. Once the body of the loop is started, it continues to the end, even when
i becomes 10.
| line | i | comment |
| 1 | 4 | |
| 2 | 4 < 9 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | 6 | 4+2=6 |
| 4 | print 6 | |
| 2 | 6 < 9 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | 8 | 6+2= 8 |
| 4 | print 8 | |
| 2 | 8 < 9 is true, do loop | |
| 3 | 10 | 8+2=10 |
| 4 | 112 | print 10 |
| 2 | 10 < 9 is false, skip loop | |
Predict what happens in this related little program:
nums = list()
i = 4
while (i < 9):
nums.append(i)
i = i+2
print(nums)
Check yourself by running the example program testWhile3.py.
There is actually a much simpler way to generate the previous sequence, using a further variation of the range function. Enter these lines separately in the Shell. As in the simpler applications of range, the values are only generated one at a time, as needed. To see the entire sequence at once, convert the sequence to a list:
nums = list(range(4, 9, 2))
print(nums)
The third parameter is needed when the step size from one element to the next is not 1.
The most general syntax is
range(start, pastEnd, step)
The value of the second parameter is always past the final element of the list. Each element after the first in the list is step more than the previous one. Predict and try in the Shell:
list(range(4, 10, 2))
Actually the range function is even more sophisticated than indicated by the while loop above. The step size can be negative.
Try in the Shell:
list(range(10, 0, -1))
Do you see how 0 is past the end of the list?
Make up a range function call to generate the list of temperatures printed in the tea example, 115, 114, 113. Test it in the Shell.
The earlier examples of while loops were chosen for their simplicity. Obviously they could have been rewritten with range function calls. Now lets try a more interesting example. Suppose you want to let a user enter a sequence of lines of text, and want to remember each line in a list. This could easily be done with a simple repeat loop if you knew the number of lines to enter. For example if you want three lines:
lines = list()
print('Enter 3 lines of text')
for i in range(3):
line = input('Next line: ')
lines.append(line)
print('Your lines were:') # check now
for line in lines:
print(line)
The user may want to enter a bunch of lines and not count them all ahead of time. This means the number of repetitions would not be known ahead of time. A while loop is appropriate here. There is still the question of how to test whether the user wants to continue. An obvious but verbose way to do this is to ask before every line if the user wants to continue, as shown below and in the example file readLines1.py. Read it and then run it:
lines = list()
testAnswer = input('Press y if you want to enter more lines: ')
while testAnswer == 'y':
line = input('Next line: ')
lines.append(line)
testAnswer = input('Press y if you want to enter more lines: ')
print('Your lines were:')
for line in lines:
print(line)
The data must be initialized before the loop, in order for the first test of the while condition to work. Also the test must work when you loop back from the end of the loop body. This means the data for the test must also be set up a second time, in the loop body.
The readLines1.py code works, but it may be more annoying than counting ahead! Two lines must be entered for every one you actually want! A practical alternative is to use a sentinel: a piece of data that would not make sense in the regular sequence, and which is used to indicate the end of the input. You could agree to use the line DONE! Even simpler: if you assume all the real lines of data will actually have some text on them, use an empty line as a sentinel. (If you think about it, the Python Shell uses this approach when you enter a statement with an indented body.) This way you only need to enter one extra (very simple) line, no matter how many lines of real data you have.
What should the while condition be now? Since the sentinel is an empty line, you might think line == '', but that is the termination condition, not the continuation condition: You need the opposite condition. To negate a condition in Python, you may use not, like in English,
not line == ''
. Of course in this situation there is a shorter way, line != ''. Run the example program readLines2.py, shown below:
lines = list()
print('Enter lines of text.')
print('Enter an empty line to quit.')
line = input('Next line: ')
while line != '':
lines.append(line)
line = input('Next line: ')
print('Your lines were:')
for line in lines:
print(line)
Again the data for the test in the while loop heading must be initialized before the first time the while statement is executed and the test data must also be made ready inside the loop for the test after the body has executed. Hence you see the statements setting the variable line both before the loop and at the end of the loop body. It is easy to forget the second place inside the loop!
Comment the last line of the loop out, and run it again after reading the rest of this paragraph. It will never stop! The variable line will forever have the initial value you gave it! You actually can stop the program by entering Ctrl-C. That means hold the Ctrl key and press C.
As you finish coding a while loop, it is good practice to always double-check: Did I make a change to the variables, inside the loop, that will eventually make the loop condition false?
Exercise 3.3.3.1. a. Write a program sumAll.py that prompts the user to enter numbers, one per line, ending with a line containing 0, and keep a running sum of the numbers. At the end (only) print out the sum. You should not need to create a list! You can immediately increase the sum with each number entered.
Another place where a while loop could be useful is in interactive graphics. Suppose you want the user to be able to create a Polygon by clicking on vertices they choose interactively, but you do not want them to have to count the number of vertices ahead of time. A while loop is suggested for such a repetitive process. As with entering lines of text interactively, there is the question of how to indicate you are done (or how to indicate to continue). If you make only a certain region be allowed for the Polygon, then the sentinel can be a mouse click outside the region. The earlier interactive color choice example already has a method to check if a mouse click is inside a Rectangle, so that method can be copied and reused.
Creating a polygon is a unified activity with a defined product, so let's define a function. It involves a boundary rectangle and mouse clicks in a GraphWin, and may as well return the Polygon constructed. Read the following start:
def polyHere(rect, win):
''' Draw a polygon interactively in Rectangle rect, in GraphWin win.
Collect mouse clicks inside rect into a Polygon.
When a click goes outside rect, stop and return the final polygon.
The polygon ends up drawn. The method draws and undraws rect.'''
# ....
It is useful to start by thinking of the objects needed, and give them names.
Certainly the overall process will be repetitious, choosing point after point. Still it may not be at all clear how to make an effective Python loop. In challenging situations like this it is often useful to imagine a concrete situation with a limited number of steps, so each step can be written in sequence without worrying about a loop.
For instance to get up to a triangle (3 vertices in our list and a fourth mouse click for the sentinel), you might imagine the following sequence, undrawing each old polygon before the next is displayed with the latest mouse click included:
rect.setOutline("red")
rect.draw(win)
vertices = list()
pt = win.getMouse()
vertices.append(pt)
poly = Polygon(vertices)
poly.draw(win) # with one point
pt = win.getMouse()
poly.undraw()
vertices.append(pt)
poly = Polygon(vertices)
poly.draw(win) # with two points
pt = win.getMouse()
poly.undraw()
vertices.append(pt)
poly = Polygon(vertices)
poly.draw(win) # with three points
pt = win.getMouse() # assume outside the region
rect.undraw()
return poly
There is a fine point here that I missed the first time. The vertices of a Polygon do not get mutated in this system. A new Polygon gets created each time with the new vertex list. The old Polygon does not go away automatically, and extraneous lines appear in the picture if the old polygon is not explicitly undrawn each time before a new version is redrawn with an extra vertex. The timing for the undraw needs to be after the next mouse click and presumably before the next Polygon is created, so it could be before or after the line vertices.append(pt). I arbitrarily chose for it to go before the vertices list is changed . The rest of the order of the lines is pretty well fixed by the basic logic.
If you think of the repetitions through a large number of loops, the process is essentially circular (as suggested by the word 'loop'). The body of a loop in Python, however, is written as a linear sequence: one with a first line and a last line, a beginning and an end. We can cut a circle anywhere to get a piece with a beginning and an end. In practice, the place you cut the loop for Python has one main constraint. The continuation condition in the while heading must make sense there. The processing in Python from the end of one time through the loop to the beginning of the next loop is separated by the test of the condition in the heading.
It can help to look at a concrete example sequence like the steps listed above for creating a triangle. The continuation condition is for pt to be in the rectangle, so using the previously written function isInside, the loop heading will be
while isInside(pt, rect):
With this condition in mind, look for where to split to loop. It needs to be after a new pt is clicked (so it can be tested) and before the next Polygon is created (so it does not include the sentinel point by mistake). In particular, with the sequence above, look and see that the split could go before or after the poly.undraw() line. Exercise 3.3.4.1 below considers the case where the split goes before this line. I will proceed with the choice of splitting into a Python loop after the undraw line. This makes the loop be
while isInside(pt, rect):
vertices.append(pt)
poly = Polygon(vertices)
poly.draw(win)
pt = win.getMouse()
poly.undraw()
If you follow the total sequence of required steps above for making the concrete triangle, you see that this full sequence for the loop is only repeated twice. The last time there is no poly.undraw() step. I could redo the loop moving the undraw line to the top, which caused different issues (Exercise 3.3.4.1 below). Instead think how to make it work at the end of the final time through the loop.
There are several possible approaches. You want the undraw line every time except for the last time. Hence it is a statement you want sometimes and not others. That suggests an if statement. The times you want the undraw are when the loop will repeat again. This is the same as the continuation condition for the loop, and you have just read the next value for pt! You could just add a condition in front of the last line of the loop:
if isInside(pt, rect):
poly.undraw()
I find this option unaesthetic: it means duplicating the continuation test twice in every loop.
Instead of avoiding the undraw as you exit the loop, another option in this case is to undo it: just redraw the polygon one final time beyond the loop. This only needs to be done once, not repeatedly in the loop. Then the repetitious lines collapse neatly into the loop, leaving a few of lines of the overall sequence before and after the loop. In the end the entire function is:
def polyHere(rect, win):
''' Draw a polygon interactively in Rectangle rect, in GraphWin win.
Collect mouse clicks inside rect into a Polygon.
When a click goes outside rect, stop and return the final polygon.
The polygon ends up drawn. The method draws and undraws rect.'''
rect.setOutline("red")
rect.draw(win)
vertices = list()
pt = win.getMouse()
while isInside(pt, rect):
vertices.append(pt)
poly = Polygon(vertices)
poly.draw(win)
pt = win.getMouse()
poly.undraw()
poly.draw(win) # undo the last poly.undraw()
rect.undraw()
return poly
Follow this code through, imagining three mouse clicks inside rect and then one click outside of rect. Compare the steps to the ones in the concrete sequence written out above and see that the match (aside from the last cancelling undraw and draw of poly).
This function is illustrated in a the example program makePoly.py. Other than standard graphics example code, the main program contains:
rect1 = Rectangle(Point(5, 55), Point(200, 120))
poly1 = polyHere(rect1, win)
poly1.setFill('green')
rect2 = Rectangle(Point(210, 50), Point(350, 350))
poly2 = polyHere(rect2, win)
poly2.setOutline('orange')
As you can see, the returned polygons are used to make color changes, just as an illustration.
Exercise 3.3.4.1. ** As discussed above, the basic loop logic works whether the poly.undraw() call is at the beginning or end of the loop. Write a variation makePoly2.py that makes the code work the other way, with the poly.undraw() at the beginning of the loop. The new place to cut the loop does affect the code before and after the loop. In particular, the extra statement drawing poly is not needed after the loop is completed. Make other changes to the surrounding code to make this work. Hints: 5
Exercise 3.3.4.2. Write a program very similar to makePoly.py, and call it makePath.py, with a function pathHere. The only outward difference between polyHere and pathHere is that while the first creates a closed polygon, and returns it, and the new one creates a polygonal path, without the final point being automatically connected to the first point, and a list of the lines in the path is returned. Internally the functions are quite different. The change simplifies some things: no need to undraw anything in the main loop - just draw the latest segment each time going from the previous point to the just clicked point. There is a complication however, you do need deal specially with the first point. It has no previous point to connect to. I suggest you handle this before the main loop, and draw the point so it is a visible guide for the next point. After your main loop is finished undraw this initial point. (The place on the screen will still be visible if an initial segment is drawn. If no more points were added, the screen is left blank, which is the way it should be.) You also need to remember the previous point each time through the main loop.
In your main program, test the makePath function several times. Use the list of lines returned to loop and change the color in one path and the width of the lines in another path. A portion of a sample image is shown below after all this is done.
In earlier animation examples a while loop would also have been useful. Rather than continuing the animation a fixed number of times, it would be nice for the user to indicate by a mouse click when she has watched long enough. Thus far the only way to use the mouse has been with getMouse(). This is not going to work in an animation, because the computer stops and waits for a click with getMouse(), whereas the animation should continue until the click.
In full-fledged graphical systems that respond to events, this is no problem. Zelle's graphics is built on top of a capable event-driven system, and in fact, all mouse clicks are registered, even outside calls to getMouse(), though Zelle's documentation pages do not mention it.
As an example, run example program randomCirclesWhile.py. Be sure to follow the prompt saying to click to start and to end.
Aside from the prompts, the difference from the previous randomCircles.py program is the replacement of the original simple repeat loop heading
for i in range(75):
code for an animation step
by the following initialization and while loop heading:
while win.checkMouse() == None: #NEW
code for an animation step
The graphics module remembers the last mouse click, whether or not it occurred during a call to getMouse(). An alternative way to check is checkMouse(). It does not wait for the mouse as in getMouse(). Instead it returns the remembered mouse click – the most recent mouse click in the past, unless there has been no mouse click since the last call to getMouse or checkMouse. In that case checkMouse() returns None (the special object used to indicate the lack of a regular object).
The checkMouse method allows for a loop that does not stop while waiting for a mouse click, but goes on until the heading test detects that the mouse was clicked.
A similar elaboration can be made for the other examples of animation, like bounce1.py. In bounceWhile.py I modified bounce1.py to have a while loop in place of the for-loop repeating 600 times. Run it. The only slight added modification here was that win was not originally a parameter to bounceInBox, so I included it. Look at the source code for bounceWhile.py, with the few changes marked NEW.
In bounce2.py I also made a more interesting change to the initialization, so the initial direction and speed of the mouse are determined graphically by the user, with a mouse click. Try example program bounce2.py.
The program includes a new utility function to help determine the initial (dx, dy) for the animation. This is done by calculating the move necessary to go from one point (where the ball is in this program) to another (specified by a user's mouse click in this program).
def getShift(point1, point2): # NEW utility function
'''Returns a tuple (dx, dy) which is the shift from point1 to point2.'''
dx = point2.getX() - point1.getX()
dy = point2.getY() - point1.getY()
return (dx, dy)
Since the function calculates both a change in x and y, it returns a tuple.
A straightforward interactive method, getUserShift, is wrapped around this function to get the user's choice, which ultimately returns the same tuple.
def getUserShift(point, prompt, win): #NEW direction selection
'''Return the change in position from the point to a mouse click in win.
First display the prompt string under point.'''
text = Text(Point(point.getX(), 60), prompt)
text.draw(win)
userPt = win.getMouse()
text.undraw()
return getShift(point, userPt)
In the new version of the main driver, bounceBall, excerpted below, this interactive setting of (dx, dy) is used. Note the multiple assignment statement to both dx and dy, set from the tuple returned from getUserShift. This shift would generally be much too much for a single animation step, so the actual values passed to bounceBall are scaled way down by a factor scale.
center = Point(winWidth/2, winHeight/2) #NEW central starting point
ball = makeDisk(center, radius, win)
#NEW interactive direction and speed setting
prompt = '''
Click to indicate the direction and
speed of the ball: The further you
click from the ball, the faster it starts.'''
(dx, dy) = getUserShift(center, prompt, win)
scale = 0.01 # to reduce the size of animation steps
bounceInBox(ball, dx*scale, dy*scale, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh, win)
The bounceInBox method has the same change to the loop as in the randomCircles.py example. The method then requires the GraphWin, win, as a further parameter, since checkMouse is a GraphWin method..
You can look in Idle at the full source code for bounce2.py if you like. The changes from bounce1.py are all marked with a comment starting with #NEW, and all the major changes have been described above.
In the examples so far of the use of checkMouse(), we have only used the fact that a point was clicked, not which point. The next example version, bounce3.py, does use the location of mouse clicks that are read with checkMouse() to change the direction and speed of the ball. Try it.
This version only slightly modifies the central animation function, bounceInBox, but wraps it in another looping function that makes the direction and speed of the ball change on each mouse click. Hence the mouse clicks detected in bounceInBox need to be remembered and then returned after the main animation loop finishes. That requires a name, pt, to be given to the last mouse click, so it can be remembered. This means modifying the main animation loop to initialize the variable pt before the loop and reset it at the end of the loop, much as in the use of getMouse() for the interactive polygon creation. That explains the first three NEW lines and the last two NEW lines in the revised bounceInBox:
def bounceInBox(shape, dx, dy, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh, win):
''' Animate a shape moving in jumps (dx, dy), bouncing when
its center reaches the low and high x and y coordinates.
The animation stops when the mouse is clicked, and the
last mouse click is returned.'''
delay = .001
pt = None #NEW
while pt == None: #NEW
shape.move(dx, dy)
center = shape.getCenter()
x = center.getX()
y = center.getY()
isInside = True #NEW
if x < xLow or x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
isInside = False #NEW
if y < yLow or y > yHigh:
dy = -dy
isInside = False #NEW
time.sleep(delay)
if isInside: # NEW don't mess with dx, dy when outside
pt = win.checkMouse() #NEW
return pt #NEW
I initially made only the changes discussed so far (not the ones involving the new variable isInside). The variable isInside was in response to a bug that I will discuss after introducing the simple function that wraps around bounceInBox:
Each time the mouse is clicked, the ball is to switch direction and move toward the last click, until the stopping condition occurs, when there is a click above the stop line. This is clearly repetitive and needs a while loop. The condition is simply to test the y coordinate of the mouse click against the the height of the stop line. The body of the loop is very short, since we already have the utility function getShift, to figure out (dx, dy) values.
def moveInBox(shape, stopHeight, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh, win): #NEW
'''Shape bounces in win so its center stays within the low and high
x and y coordinates, and changes direction based on mouse clicks,
terminating when there is a click above stopHeight.'''
scale = 0.01
pt = shape.getCenter() # starts motionless
while pt.getY() < stopHeight:
(dx, dy) = getShift(shape.getCenter(), pt)
pt = bounceInBox(shape, dx*scale, dy*scale,
xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh, win)
The variable pt for the last mouse click needed to be initialized some way. I chose to make the value be the same as the initial position of the ball, so both dx and dy are initially 0, and the ball does not start in motion. (Alternatives are in Exercise 3.3.4.3 below.)
I occasionally detected a bug when using the program. The ball would get stuck just outside the boundary and stay there. The fact that it was slightly beyond the boundary was a clue: For simplicity I had cheated, and allowed the ball to go just one animation step beyond the intended boundary. With the speed and small step size this works visually. The original code was sure to make an opposite jump back inside at the next step.
After some thought, I noticed that the initial version of the bounce3.py code for bounceInBox broke that assumption. When the ball was where a bounce-back is required, a mouse click could change (dx, dy) and mess up the bounce. The idea for a fix is not to let the user change the direction in the moment when the ball needs to bounce back.
Neither of the original boundary-checking if statements, by itself, always determines if the ball is in the region where it needs to reverse direction. I dealt with this situation by introducing a Boolean variable isInside. It is initially set as True, and then either of the if statements can correct it to False. Then, at the end of the loop, isInside is used to make sure the ball is safely inside the proper region when there is a check for a new mouse click and a possible user adjustment to (dx, dy).
Exercise 3.3.4.3. ** (Optional) I chose to have the ball start motionless, by making the initial value of pt (which determines the initial (dx, dy) ) be the center of the ball. Write a variation startRandom.py so pt is randomly chosen. Also make the initial location of the ball be random. You can copy the function getRandomPoint from bounce1.py.
Exercise 3.3.4.4. ** Write a program madlib4.py that modifies the getKeys method of madlib2.py to use a while loop. (This is not an animation program, but this section is where you have had the most experience with while loops!) Hint: 6
Exercise 3.3.4.5. ** Write a graphical game program, findHole.py, “Find the Hole”. The program should use a random number generator to select a point and a perhaps radius around that point. These determine the target and are not revealed to the player initially. The user is then prompted to click around on the screen to “find the hidden hole”. You should show the points the user has tried. Once the user selects a point that is within the chosen radius of the mystery point, the mystery circle should appear, and the point of the final successful mouse click should show. There should be a message announcing how many steps it took, and the game should end.
Hint: you have already seen the code to determine the displacement (dx, dy) between two points: use the getShift function in bounce2.py. Once you have the displacement (dx, dy) between the hidden center and the latest mouse click, the distance between the points is (dx*dx + dy*dy)**0.5, using the Pythagorean Theorem of geometry. If this distance is no more than the radius you have chosen for the mystery circle, then the user has found the circle! You can use getShift as written, or modify it into a function getDistance that directly returns the distance between two points.
Many elaborations on this game are possible! Have fun with it!
The final variation is the example program bounce4.py, which has the same outward behavior as bounce3.py, but it illustrates a different internal design decision. The bounce3.py version has two levels of while loop in two methods, moveInBox.for mouse clicks and bounceInBox for bouncing. The bounce4.py version puts all the code for changing direction inside the main animation loop in the old outer function, moveInBox. There are now three reasons to adjust (dx, dy): bouncing off the sides, bouncing off the top or bottom, or a mouse click. That is a simplification and unification of the logic in one sense. The complication now is that the logic for determining when to quit is buried deep inside the if-else logic, not at the heading of the loop. The test for mouse clicks is inside the while loop and further inside another if statment. The test of the mouse click may merely lead to a change in (dx, dy), or is a signal to quit. Here is the revised code, with a discussion afterward of the return statement:
def moveInBox(shape, stopHeight, xLow, xHigh, yLow, yHigh, win):
''' Animate a shape moving toward any mouse click below stopHeight and
bouncing when its center reaches the low or high x or y coordinates.
The animation stops when the mouse is clicked at stopHeight or above.'''
scale = 0.01
delay = .001
dx = 0 #NEW dx and dy no longer parameters
dy = 0 #NEW
while True: #NEW exit loop at return statement
center = shape.getCenter()
x = center.getX()
y = center.getY()
isInside = True
if x < xLow or x > xHigh:
dx = -dx
isInside = False
if y < yLow or y > yHigh:
dy = -dy
isInside = False
if isInside:
pt = win.checkMouse()
if pt != None: #NEW dealing with mouse click now here
if pt.getY() < stopHeight: # switch direction
(dx, dy) = getShift(center, pt)
(dx, dy) = (dx*scale, dy*scale)
else: #NEW exit from depths of the loop
return #NEW
shape.move(dx, dy)
time.sleep(delay)
Recall that a return statement immediately terminates function execution. In this case the function returns no value, but a bare return is legal to force the exit. Since the testing is not done in the normal while condition, the while condition is set as permanently True. This is not the most common while loop pattern! It obscures the loop exit. The choice between the approach of bounce3.py and bounce4.py is a matter of taste in the given situation.
The following section would merely be an advanced topic, except for the fact that many common mistakes have their meaning changed and obscured by the Boolean syntax discussed.
You have seen how many kinds of objects can be converted to other types. Any object can be converted to Boolean (type bool). Read the examples shown in this Shell sequence:
>>> bool(2)
True
>>> bool(-3.1)
True
>>> bool(0)
False
>>> bool(0.0)
False
>>> bool(None)
False
>>> bool('')
False
>>> bool('0')
True
>>> bool('False')
True
>>> bool([])
False
>>> bool([0])
True
The result looks pretty strange, but there is a fairly short general explanation: Almost everything is converted to True. The only values among built-in types that are interpreted as False are
A possibly useful consequence occurs in the fairly common situation where something needs to be done with a list only if it is nonempty. In this case the explicit syntax:
if len(aList) > 0:
doSomethingWith(aList)
can be written with the more succinct python idiom
if aList:
doSomethingWith(aList)
This automatic conversion can also lead to extra trouble! Suppose you prompt the user for the answer to a yes/no question, and want to accept 'y' or 'yes' as indicating True. You might write the following incorrect code. Read it:
ans = input('Is this OK? ')
if ans == 'y' or 'yes':
print('Yes, it is OK')
The problem is that there are two binary operations here: ==, or. Comparison operations all have higher precedence than the logical operations or, and. The if condition above can be rewritten equivalently with parentheses. Read and consider:
(ans == 'y') or 'yes'
Other programming languages have the advantage of stopping with an error at such an expression, since a string like 'yes' is not Boolean. Python, however, accepts the expression, and treats 'yes' as True! To test, run the example program boolConfusion.py, shown below:
ans = 'y'
if ans == 'y' or 'yes':
print('y is OK')
ans = 'no'
if ans == 'y' or 'yes':
print('no is OK!!???')
Python detects no error. The or expression is always treated as True, since 'yes' is a non-empty sequence, interpreted as True.
The intention of the if condition presumably was something like
(ans == 'y') or (ans == 'yes')
This version also translates directly to other languages. Another correct Pythonic alternative that groups the alternate values together is
ans in ['y', 'yes']
which reads pretty much like English. It is true if ans is in the specified list. The in operator actually works with any sequence. The general syntax is
value in sequence
This is true when value is an element of the sequence.
Be careful to use a correct expression when you want to specifiy a condition like this.
Things get even stranger! Enter these conditions themselves, one at a time, directly into the Shell:
'y' == 'y' or 'yes'
'no' == 'y' or 'yes'
The meaning of (a or b) is exactly as discussed so far if each of the operands a and b are actually Boolean, but a more elaborate definition is needed if an operand is not Boolean.
val = a or b
means
if bool(a):
val = a
else:
val = b
and in a similar vein:
val = a and b
means
if bool(a):
val = b
else:
val = a
This strange syntax was included in Python to allow code like in the following example program orNotBoolean.py. Read and test if you like:
defaultColor = 'red'
userColor = input('Enter a color, or just press Enter for the default: ')
color = userColor or defaultColor
print('The color is', color)
which sets color to the value of defaultColor if the user enters an empty string.
Again, this may be useful to experienced programmers. The syntax can certainly cause difficult bugs, particularly for beginners!
The not operator always produces a result of type bool.
Chapter 4 gives an application of Python to the web. It does not introduce new language features. We have come to end of the new language features in this tutorial, but there are certainly more basic topics to learn about programming and Python in particular, if you continue in other places:
Beyond these language features, Python has a vast collection of useful modules. An example program, bbassign.py, is a real-world program that I have in regular use for processing inconveniently organized files created by Blackboard for homework submissions. It is a command-line script that uses string methods and slicing and both kinds of loops, as well is illustrating some useful componets in modules sys, os, and os.path, for accessing command line parameters, listing file directories, creating directories, and moving and renaming files.
| Meaning | Math Symbol | Python Symbols |
| Less than | < | < |
| Greater than | > | > |
| Less than or equal | ≤ | <= |
| Greater than or equal | ≥ | >= |
| Equals | = | == |
| Not equal | ≠ | != |
Comparisons may be chained as in a < b <= c < d != e. [3.1.5]
True only if both conditions are True
True only if at least one conditions is True
True when condition is False; False when condition is True
This description is sufficient if the result is used as a Boolean value (in an if or while condition). See Section 3.4 for the advanced use when operands are not explicitly Boolean, and the result is not going to be interpreted as Boolean.
if condition:
indentedStatementBlockForTrueCondition
If the condition is true, then do the indented statement block. If the condition is not true, then s
If the condition is true, then do the first indented block only. If the condition is not true, then skip the first indented block and do the one after the else:.
If the condition is true, then do the first indented block only. If the condition is not true, then skip the first indented block and do the one after the else:.
if condition:
indentedStatementBlockForTrueCondition
else:
indentedStatementBlockForFalseCondition
If the condition is true, then do the first indented block only. If the condition is not true, then skip the first indented block and do the one after the else:.
if condition1 :
indentedStatementBlockForTrueCondition1
elif condition2 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition2
elif condition3 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition3
elif condition4 :
indentedStatementBlockForFirstTrueCondition4
else:
indentedStatementBlockForEachConditionFalse
The if, each elif, and the final else line are all aligned. There can be any number of elif lines, each followed by an indented block. (Three happen to be illustrated above.) With this construction exactly one of the indented blocks is executed. It is the one corresponding to the first True condition, or, if all conditions are False, it is the block after the final else line
while condition:
indentedStatementBlock
Do the indented block if condition is True, and at the end of the indented block loop back and test the condition again, and continue repeating the indented block as long as the condition is True after completing the indented block. Execution does not stop in the middle of the block, even if the condition becomes False at that point.
A while loop can be used to set up an (intentionally) apparently infinite loop by making condition be just True. To end the loop in that case, there can be a test inside the loop that sometime becomes True, allowing the execution of a return statement to break out of the loop. [3.3.5]
initialization
while continuation condition :
main action to repeat
prepare variables for next loop
input first data from user
while continue based on test of user data :
process user data
input next user data
Often the code to input the first data and the later data is the same, but it must appear in both places!
This chapter leads up to the creation of dynamic web pages. These pages and supporting programs and data may be tested locally via a simple Python web server available on your local machine. If you have access, the pages and programs may be uploaded to a public server accessible to anyone on the Internet.
A few disclaimers:
The chapter does allow you to understand the overall interaction between a browser (like Firefox on your local machine) and a web server and to create dynamic web content with Python. We treat interaction with the web basically as a mechanism to get input into a Python program and data back out and displayed. Web pages displayed in your browser are used for both the input and the output. The advantage of a public server is that it can also be used to store data accessible to people all over the world.
There are a number of steps in the development in this chapter, so I start with an overview:
Documents can be presented in many forms. A simple editor like Idle or Windows' Notepad produce plain text: essentially a long string of meaningful characters.
Documents can be displayed with formatting of parts of the document. Web pages allow different fonts, italic, and boldfaced emphases, and different sized text, all to be included. Microsoft Word, Open Office, and Latex, all display documents with various amounts of formatting. The syntax for the ways different systems encode the formatting information varies enormously.
If you look at a Microsoft Word document in a plain text editor like notepad, you should be able to find the original text buried inside, but most of the symbols associated with the formatting are unprintable gibberish as far as a human is concerned.
Hypertext markup language (HTML) is very different in that regard. It produces a file of entirely human-readable characters, that could be produced with a plain text editor.
For instance in HTML, the largest form of a heading with the text “Web Introduction”, would look like
| <h1>Web Introduction</h1> |
With the enormous explosion of the World Wide Web, specialized software has been developed to make web editing be much like word processing, with a graphical interface, allowing formatting to be done by selecting text with a mouse and clicking menus and icons labeled in more natural language. The software then automatically generates the necessary markup. An example used in these tutorials is the open source Kompozer, available at http://kompozer.net. (Careful – although this is free, open source software, the URL is Kompozer.net, not Kompozer.org. There is a site Kompozer.org that is designed to confuse you!) You can open Kompozer and easily generate a document with a heading, and italic and boldfaced portions....
This section introduces the Kompozer web page editor to create static pages. Kompozer is used because it is free software, and is pretty easy to use, like a common word processor. Unlike a common word processor you will be able to easily look at the HTML markup code underneath. It is not necessary to know a lot about the details of the markup codes for HTML files to use Kompozer.
We will use static pages later as a part of making dynamic pages, using the static pages as templates in which we insert data dynamically.
To creating static web pages
The discussion of web page editing continues in Section 4.3.4, on html forms, but first we get Python into the act.
In this chapter you will be working with several different types of documents that you will edit and test in very different ways. The ending of their names indicate their use. Each time a new type of file is discussed in later sections, the proper ways to work with it will be repeated, but with all the variations, it is useful to group them all in one place now:
For the rest of this chapter, the example files will come from the www directory under the main examples directory you unzipped. I will refer to example file there as “example www files”.
As the overview indicated, dynamic web applications typically involve getting input in from a web page form, processing the input in a program on the server, and displaying output to a web page. Introducing all these new ideas at once could be a lot to absorb, so this section treats only the last part, output to the web, and uses familiar keyboard input into a regular Python program.
Follow this sequence of steps:
Open the example www file hello.html in your browser, to see what it looks like.
Change your browser view - for instance go back to the previous page you displayed.
Open the same hello.html file in Kompozer.
In Kompozer, switch to the Source view (clicking the Source tab). Sometimes you will want to copy HTML text into a Python program. For instance, I selected and copied the entire contents of the hello.html source view and pasted it into a multi line string in the Python program shown and discussed below.
Careful, note the change from past practice here: Start Python from inside the www directory. In Windows start the Idle shortcut link that I placed in the www directory, not the original example directory. Open the www example program helloWeb1.py in an Idle edit window.
Run it. You should see a familiar web page appear in your default browser (possibly not the one you have been using). This is obviously not a very necessary program, since you can select this page directly in your browser! Still, one step at a time, it illustrates several useful points. The program is copied below. Read it:
'''A simple program to create an html file from a given string,
and call the default web browser to display the file.'''
contents = '''<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="content-type">
<title>Hello</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello, World!
</body>
</html>
'''
def main():
browseLocal(contents, 'helloPython.html')
def strToFile(text, filename):
"""Write a file with the given name and the given text."""
output = open(filename,"w")
output.write(text)
output.close()
def browseLocal(webpageText, filename):
"""Start your webbrowser on a local file containing the text."""
strToFile(webpageText, filename)
import webbrowser
webbrowser.open(filename)
main()
This program encapsulates two basic operations into the last two functions that will be used over and over. The first, strToFile, has nothing new, it just puts specified text in a file with a specified name. The second, browseLocal, does more. It takes specified text (presumably a web page), puts it in a file, and directly displays the file in your web browser. It uses the open function from the webbrowser module to start the new page in your web browser.
In this particular program the text that goes in the file is just copied from the literal string named contents in the program.
This is no advance over just opening the file in the browser directly! Still, it is a start towards the aim of creating web content dynamically.
An early example in this tutorial displayed the fixed 'Hello World!' to the screen. This was later modified in hello_you4.py to incorporate user input using the string format method of Section 1.12.2,
person = input('Enter your name: ')
greeting = 'Hello {person}!'.format(**locals())
print(greeting)
Similarly, I can turn the web page contents into a format string, and insert user data. Load and run the www example program helloWeb2.py.
The simple changes from helloWeb1.py are marked at the beginning of the file and shown below. I modified the web page text to contain 'Hello, {person}!' in place of 'Hello, World!', making the string into a format string, which I renamed to the more appropriate pageTemplate. The changed initial portion with the literal string and and the main program then becomes
pageTemplate = '''
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="content-type">
<title>Hello</title>
</head>
<body>
Hello, {person}!
</body>
</html> ''' # NEW note '{person}' two lines up
def main():
person = input('Enter a name: ') # NEW
contents = pageTemplate.format(**locals()) # NEW
browseLocal(contents, 'helloPython2.html') # NEW filename
incorporating the person's name into the contents for the web page before saving and displaying it.
In this case, I stored the literal format string inside the Python program, but consider a different approach:
Load and run the www example program helloWeb3.py. It behaves exactly like helloWeb2.py, but is slightly different internally – it does not directly contain the web page template string. Instead the web page template string is read from the file helloTemplate.html.
Below is the beginning of helloWeb3.py, showing the only new functions. The first, fileToStr, will be a standard function used in the future. It is the inverse of strToFile.
The main program obtains the input. In this simple example, the input is used directly, with little further processing. It is inserted into the web page, using 'helloTemplate.html' as a format string.
def fileToStr(fileName): # NEW
"""Return a string containing the contents of the named file."""
fin = open(fileName);
contents = fin.read();
fin.close()
return contents
def main():
person = input('Enter a name: ')
contents = fileToStr('helloTemplate.html').format(**locals()) # NEW
browseLocal(contents, 'helloPython3.html') # NEW filename
Although helloTemplate.html is not intended to be viewed by the user (being a template), you should open it in a web editor (like Kompozer) to look at it. It is legal to create a web page in a web page editor with expressions in braces embedded in it! If you look in the source view in Kompozer you will see something similar to the literal string in helloWeb2.py, except the lines are broken up differently. (This makes no difference in the formatted result, since in html, a newline is treated the same way as a space.)
Back in the Normal mode, add some formatting like italics, and an extra line of text, and save the file again (under the same name). Run the program helloWeb3.py again, and see that you have been able to change the appearance of the output without changing the Python program itself. That is the aim of using the template html page, allowing the web output formatting to be managed mostly independently from the Python program.
A more complicated but much more common situation is where the input data is processed and transformed into results somehow, and these results, often along with some of the original input, are embedded in the web page that is produced.
As a simple example, load and run the www example program additionWeb.py, which uses the template file additionTemplate.html.
The aim in the end of this chapter is to have user input come from a form on the web rather than the keyboard on a local machine, but in either case the input is still transformed into results and all embedded in a web page. To make parts easily reusable, I obtain the input in a distinct place from where the input is processed. In keeping with the later situation with web forms, all input is of string type ( using keyboard input for now).
Look at the program. You will see only a few new lines! Because of the modular design, most of the program is composed of recent standard functions reused.
The only new code is at the beginning and is shown here:
def processInput(numStr1, numStr2): # NEW
'''Process input parameters and return the final page as a string.'''
num1 = int(numStr1) # transform input to output data
num2 = int(numStr2)
total = num1+num2
return fileToStr('additionTemplate.html').format(**locals())
def main(): # NEW
numStr1 = input('Enter an integer: ') # obtain input
numStr2 = input('Enter another integer: ')
contents = processInput(numStr1, numStr2) # process input into a page
browseLocal(contents, 'helloPython3.html') # display page
The input is obtained (via input for now), and it is processed into a web page string, and as a separate step it is displayed in a local web page.
There are a few things to note:
Exercise 4.2.1.1. ** Save additionWeb.py as quotientWeb.py. Modify it to display the results of a division problem in a web page. You can take your calculations from Exercise 1.10.3.2. You should only need to make Python changes to the processInput and main functions. You will also need the HTML for the page displayed. Make a web page template file called quotientTemplate.html and read it into your program.
In this version generated by a regular Python program, the web page is just a file generated by the program, and then the file gets displayed in the browser. When you call browseLocal, you must supply a filename for the file to be created, but the name is totally arbitrary.
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. This interface is used by web servers to process information requests supplied by a browser. Python has modules to allow programs to do this work. The convention used by many servers is to have the server programs that satisfy this interface end in '.cgi'. That is the convention used below. All files below ending in '.cgi' are CGI programs on a web server, and in this chapter, they will all be Python programs (though there are many other languages in use for this purpose). These programs are often called scripts, so we will be dealing with Python CGI scripts.
The first part of this section requires you to have access to the Internet. Later you will also see that you can illustrate the exact same actions on your own local machine.
For a very simple but complete example, use your browser to go to the page on the public Loyola server, http://cs.luc.edu/anh/python/hands-on/examples/www/adder.html. You see a web form. Follow the instructions, enter numbers, and click on the Find Sum button. You get back a page that obviously used your data. This is the idea that you can generalize. First consider the basic execution steps behind the scene:
This also works locally, entirely on your own computer, using a simple server built into Python. (Internet no longer needed!)
In an operating system file window, go to the folder with the www examples. Double click on localCGIServer.py to start the local, internal, web server. You should see a console window pop up, saying “Localhost CGI server started” . Once the server is started, leave the console window there as long as you want the local server running. Do not start the local server running from inside Idle.
Caution: If the server aborts and gives an error message about spaces in the path, look at the path through the parent directories over this www directory. If any of the directory names have spaces in them, the local file server will not work. Either go up the directory chain and alter the directory names to eliminate spaces or move the examples directory to a directory that does not have this issue. In particular, you need to move your examples directory if it is under the 'My Programs' directory.
Back in the www directory,
For the rest of this chapter, we will be wanting to use the local server, so restart localCGIServer.py, and keep it going.
Before we get too complicated, consider the source code of a couple of even simpler examples.
The simplest case is a CGI script with no input. The script just generates plain text, rather than HTML. Assuming you have your local server going, you can go to the link for hellotxt.cgi, http://localhost:8080/hellotxt.cgi. The code is in the www example directory, hellotxt.cgi, and below for you to read:
#!/usr/bin/python
# Required header that tells the browser how to render the text.
print("Content-Type: text/plain\n\n") # here text -- not html
# Print a simple message to the display window.
print("Hello, World!\n")
The top line is what tells a Unix server that this is a Python program. It says where to find the Python interpreter to process the rest of the script. This exact line is always required to run on a Unix server (like the one Loyola's Computer Science Department uses). The line is ignored in Windows. If you leave the line there as a part of your standard text, you have one less thing to think about when uploading to a Unix server.
The first print function is telling the server which receives this output, that the format of the rest of the output will be plain text. This information gets passed back to the browser later. This line should be included exactly as stated IF you only want the output to be plain text (the simplest case, but not our usual case).
The rest of the output (in this case just from one print function) becomes the body of the plain text document you see on your browser screen, verbatim since it is plain text. The server captures this output and redirects it to your browser.
We can make some variation and display an already determined html page rather than plain text. Try the link http://localhost:8080/hellohtml.cgi. The code is in the www example directory, hellohtml.cgi, and below for you to read:
#!/usr/bin/python
print("Content-Type: text/html\n\n") # html markup follows
print("""
<html>
<Title>Hello in HTML</Title>
<body>
<p>Hello There!</p>
<p><b>Hi There!</b></p>
</body>
</html> """)
There are two noteworthy changes. The first print function now declares the rest of the output will be html. This is the standard line you will be using for your CGI programs. The remaining print function has the markup for an html page. Note that the enclosing triple quotes work for a multi line string. Other than as a simple illustration, this CGI script has no utility: Just putting the contents of the last print function in a file for a static web page hello.html is much simpler.
One more simple step: we can have a CGI script that generates dynamic output by reading the clock from inside of Python: Try the link http://localhost:8080/now.cgi. Then click the refresh button and look again. This cannot come from a static page. The code is in the www example directory, now.cgi, and below for you to read:
#!/usr/bin/python
import time
print("Content-Type: text/html\n\n") # html markup follows
timeStr = time.strftime("%c") # obtains complete current time
htmlFormat = """
<html>
<Title>The Time Now</Title>
<body>
<p>The current Central date and time is: {timeStr}</p>
</body>
</html> """
print(htmlFormat.format(**locals())) # see embedded {timeStr} ^ above
This illustrates a couple more ideas: First a library module, time, is imported and used to generate the string for the current date and time.
The web page is generated like in helloWeb2.py, embedding the dynamic data (in this case the time) into a literal web page format string. (Note the embedded {timeStr}.) Unlike helloWeb2.py, this is a CGI script so the web page contents are delivered to the server just with a print function.
It is a small further step to processing dynamic input. Try filling out and submitting the adder form one more time, http://localhost:8080/adder.html. This time notice the URL at the top of the browser page when the result is displayed. You should see something like the following (only the numbers should be the ones you entered):
http://localhost:8080/adder.cgi?x=24&y=56
This shows one mechanism to deliver data from a web form to the CGI script that processes it. The names x and y are used in the form (as we will see later) and the data you entered is associated with those names. In fact a form is not needed at all to create such an association: If you directly go to the URLs http://localhost:8080/adder.cgi?x=24&y=56 or http://localhost:8080/adder.cgi?x=-12345678924&y=33333333333, you get arithmetic displayed without the form. This is just a new input mechanism into the CGI script.
You have already seen a program to produce this adder page from inside a regular Python program taking input from the keyboard. The new CGI version, adder.cgi, only needs to make a few modifications to accept input this way from the browser. New features are commented in the source and discussed below. The new parts are the import statement through the main function, and the code after the end of the fileToStr function. Read at least these new parts in the source code shown below:
#!/usr/bin/python
import cgi # NEW
def main(): # NEW except for the call to processInput
form = cgi.FieldStorage() # standard cgi script lines to here!
# use format of next two lines with YOUR names and default data
numStr1 = form.getfirst("x", "0") # get the form value associated with form
# name 'x'. Use default "0" if there is none.
numStr2 = form.getfirst("y", "0") # similarly for name 'y'
contents = processInput(numStr1, numStr2) # process input into a page
print(contents)
def processInput(numStr1, numStr2): # from additionWeb.py
'''Process input parameters and return the final page as a string.'''
num1 = int(numStr1) # transform input to output data
num2 = int(numStr2)
total = num1+num2
return fileToStr('additionTemplate.html').format(**locals())
# the remaining code should become standard in your cgi scripts
def fileToStr(fileName):
"""Return a string containing the contents of the named file."""
fin = open(fileName);
contents = fin.read();
fin.close()
return contents
try: # NEW
print("Content-type: text/html\n\n") # say generating html
main()
except:
cgi.print_exception() # catch and print errors
First the overall structure of the code:
At the end is the new, but standard, cgi wrapper code for main(). This is code that you can always just copy. I chose to put the initial print function here, that tells the server html is being produced. That mean the main method only needs to construct and print the actual html code. Also keep the final try-except block that catches any execution errors in the program and generates possibly helpful trace information that you can see from your browser. (Writing such error catching code in general is not covered in this introductory tutorial.)
The main function has three sections, as in the local web page version: read input (this time from the form), process it, and generate the html output.
variable = form.getfirst(nameAttrib, default)
If there is a form field with name nameAttrib, its value from the browser data is assigned to variable. If no value is given in the browser's data for nameAttrib, variable is set equal to default instead. In this way data associated with names given by the browser can transferred to your Python CGI program. In this program the values associated with the browser-supplied names, 'x' and 'y', are extracted. I use Python variable names that remind you that all values from the browser forms are strings.
This program can now serve as a template for your own CGI scripts: The only things you need to change are the lines in main() that get the input from a web form, and the contents of processInput, and the processInput part can be written and tested earlier with a local web page. While this is the only Python code, you still need to create an output web page template, and refer to it in the parameter of fileToStr.
Before you start running your own CGI scripts on the local server, it is important to understand how different kinds of errors that you might make will be handled.
We have not covered web forms yet, but rather than bite off too much at once, this is a good time to write your own first CGI script.
Exercise 4.3.3.1. ** Modify Exercise 4.2.1.1 and save it as a CGI script quotient.cgi, in the same directory where you have localCGIServer.py and your output page template. Make quotient.cgi take its input from a browser, rather than the keyboard. This means merging all the standard CGI code from adder.cgi and the processInput code from your quotientWeb.py. You can keep the same browser data names, x and y, as in adder.cgi, so the main method should not need changes from adder.cgi. Remember to test for syntax errors inside Idle, and to have the local web server running when you run the CGI script in your browser. Since we have not yet covered web forms, test your CGI script by entering test data into the URL in the browser, like by going to links http://localhost:8080/quotient.cgi?x=24&y=56 and http://localhost:8080/quotient.cgi?x=36&y=15. After trying these links, you can edit the numbers in the URL in the browser to see different results.
This section is a continuation of Section 4.1.2. It is about HTML editing, not Python. HTML forms will allow user-friendly data entry for Python CGI scripts. This is the last elaboration to allow basic web interaction: Enter data in a form, submit it, and get a processed result back from the server.
The initial example, adder.html, used only two text fields. To see more common form fields, open http://localhost:8080/commonFormFields.html. (Make sure your local server is still running!)
To allow easy concentration on the data sent by the browser, this form connects to a simple CGI script dumpcgi.cgi, that just dumps all the form data to a web page. Press the submit button in the form, and see the result. Back up from the output to the previous page, the form, and change some of the data in all kinds of fields. Submit again and see the results. Play with this until you get the idea clearly that the form is passing on your data.
To play with it at a deeper level, open this same file, the www example commonFormFields.html, in Kompozer. The static text in this page is set up as a tutorial on forms in Kompozer. Read the content of the page describing how to edit the overall form and each type of individual field. Textbooks such as the Analytical Engine give another discussion of some of the attributes associated with each field type. Read the static text about how to edit individual fields, and change some field parameters, save the file and reload it in your browser, and submit again. If you change the name or value attributes, they are immediately indicated in the dumped output. If you change things like the text field size, it makes a change in the way the form looks and behaves. You can return to the original version: An extra copy is saved in commonFormFieldsOrig.html.
Now open adder.html in Kompozer. Switch to the Source view. This is a short enough page that you should not get lost in the source code. The raw text illustrates another feature of html: attributes. The tag to start the form contains not only the tag code form, but also several expressions that look like Python assignment statements with string values. The names on the left-hand side of the equal signs identify a type of attribute, and the string value after the equal sign gives the corresponding value for the attribute. The tag for many kinds of input fields is input. Notice that each field includes name and value attributes. See that the 'x' and 'y' that are passed in the URL by the browser come from the names given in the HTML code for the corresponding fields.
Kompozer and other web editors translate your menu selections into the raw html code with proper attribute types. This high level editor behavior is convenient to avoid having to learn and debug the exact right html syntax! On the other hand, using pop-up field editing windows has the disadvantage that you can only see the attributes of one field at a time. Particularly if you want to modify a number of name or value attributes, it is annoying that you need a number of mouse clicks to go from one field to the next. If you only want to modify the values of existing attributes like name and value, it may be easier to do in the source window, where you can see everything at once. Making syntax errors in not very likely if you only change data in quoted value strings.
The action URL is a property of the entire form. To edit it in Kompozer, right click inside the form, but not on any field element, and select the bottom pop-up choice, Form Properties. Then you see a window listing the Action URL and you can change the value to the name of the CGI script that you want to receive the form data. When you create your own web form, I suggest you make the initial action URL be dumpcgi.cgi. This will allow you to debug your form separate from your CGI script. When you have tested that your web form has all the right names and initial values, you can change the action URL to your CGI script name (like quotient.cgi), and go on to test the combination of the form and the CGI script!
Exercise 4.3.4.1. ** Complete the web presentation for quotient.cgi of Exercise 4.3.3.1 by creating a web form quotient.html that is intelligible to a user and which supplies the necessary data to quotient.cgi.
Be sure to test the new form on your local server! Remember that you must have the local server running first. You must have all the associated files in the same directory as the server program you are running, and you cannot just click on quiotient.html in a file browser. You must start it from the the URL http://localhost:8080/quotient.html, that specifically refers to the server localhost.
Exercise 4.3.4.2. ** Make a simple complete dynamic web presentation with a CGI script that uses at least three user inputs from a form. The simplest would be to just add three numbers instead of two. Call your form dynamic.html. Call your CGI script dynamic.cgi. Call an output template dynamicTemplate.html. remember the details listed in the previous exercise to make the results work on localhost. After the server is started and you have all the files, go to http://localhost:8080/dynamic.html.
The Summary Section 4.4 starts with the overall process for creating dynamic web pages.
One of the advantages of having a program running on a public server is that data may be stored centrally and augmented and shared by all. In high performance sites data is typically stored in a sophisticated database, beyond the scope of this tutorial. For a less robust but simpler way to store data persistently, we can use simple text files on the server.
The www example page namelist.html uses namelist.cgi to maintain a file namelist.txt of data submitted by users of the page. You can test the program with your local Python server. It is less impressive when you are the only one who can make changes! You may also try the copy on the public Loyola server, http://cs.luc.edu/anh/python/hands-on/examples/www/namelist.html. The local source code is documented for those who would like to have a look.
You also may want to look at the source code of the utility script you have been using, dumpcgi.cgi. It uses a method of getting values from the CGI data that has not been discussed:
val = form.getlist(name)
This method returns a list of values associated with a name from the web form. The list many have, 0, 1, or many elements. It is needed if you have a number of check boxes with the same name. (Maybe you want a list of all the toppings someone selects for a pizza.)
Both dumpcgi.cgi and namelist.html add an extra layer of robustness in reflecting back arbitrary text from a user. The user's text may include symbols used specially in html like '<'. The function safePlainText replaces reserved symbols with appropriate alternatives.
The examples in earlier sections were designed to illustrate the flow of data from input form to output page, but neither the html or the data transformations have been very complicated. A more elaborate situation is ordering pizza online, and recording the orders for the restaurant owner. You can try http://localhost:8080/pizza1.cgi several times and look at the supporting example www files pizza1.cgi, pizzaOrderTemplate1.html, and the simple pizzaReportTemplate.html. To see the report, the owner needs to know the special name owner777. After ordering several pizzas, enter that name and press the Submit button again.
This script gets used in two ways by a regular user: initially, when there is no order, and later to confirm an order that has been submitted. The two situations use different logic, and the script must distinguish what is the current use. A hidden variable is used to distinguish the two cases: when pizza1.cgi is called directly (not from a form), there is no pastState field. On the other hand the pizzaOrderTemplate1.html includes a hidden field named pastState, which is set to the value 'order'. (You can confirm this by examining the end of the page in Kompozer's source mode.) The script checks the value of the field pastState, and varies its behavior based on whether the value is 'order' or not.
The form in pizzaOrderTemplate1.html has radio buttons and check boxes hard coded into it for the options, and copies of the data are in pizza1.cgi. Keeping multiple active copies of data is not a good idea: They can get out of sync. If you look at the source code for pizzaOrderTemplate1.html, you see that all the entries for the radio button and check box lines are in a similar form. In the better version with altered files pizza.cgi and pizzaOrderTemplate.html (that appears the same to the user), the basic data for the pizza options is only in one place in pizza.cgi, and the proper number of lines of radio buttons and check boxes with the right data are generated dynamically.
A further possible elaboration would be to also allow the restaurant manager to edit the size, cost and topping data online, and store the data in a file rather than having the data coded in pizza.cgi, so if the manager runs out of a topping, she can remove it from the order form. this change would be a fairly elaborate project compared to the earlier exercises!
Final www examples are a pair of programs in real use in my courses. To illustrate, you can try the sample survey, http://localhost:8080/pythonTutorialsurvey.html. Run it several times with different responses. Forms can be set up like this one to link to the www example CGI script surveyFeedback.cgi, which will save any number of responses to the survey. After getting responses you can start the Idle shortcut in the www example directory and run the regular Python program, readFeedback.py, which is also in the www example directory: At the prompt for a survey base name, enter exactly:
pythonTutorial
Then the program prints out all the survey feedback, grouped in two different ways. It documents the use of a couple of modules not introduced in this tutorial, but the rest just uses ideas from the tutorial, including considerable emphasis on dictionaries and string processing.