Trying to understand how "%s%s" %(a,a) is working in below code I have only seen it inside print function thus far.Could anyone please explain how it is working inside int()?
a=input()
b=int("%s%s" %(a,a))
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2 Answers
this "%s" format has been borrowed from C printf format, but is much more interesting because it doesn't belong to print statement. Note that it involves just one argument passed to print (or to any function BTW):
print("%s%s" % (a,a))
and not (like C) a variable number of arguments passed to some functions that accept & understand them:
printf("%s%s,a,a);
It's a standalone way of creating a string from a string template & its arguments (which for instance solves the tedious issue of: "I want a logger with formatting capabilities" which can be achieved with great effort in C or C++, using variable arguments + vsprintf or C++11 variadic recursive templates).
Note that this format style is now considered legacy. Now you'd better use format, where the placeholders are wrapped in {}.
One of the direct advantages here is that since the argument is repeated you just have to do:
int("{0}{0}".format(a))
(it references twice the sole argument in position 0)
Both legacy and format syntaxes are detailed with examples on https://pyformat.info/
or since python 3.6 you can use fstrings:
>>> a = 12
>>> int(f"{a}{a}")
1212
answered Sep 11, 2018 at 13:41
2 Comments
Vicky
Thanks ! Can I use fstrings in print function as well ? Like
print (f"{a}{a}") I tried it , it gave me syntax error.Jean-François Fabre
it works but from 3.6. Below version 3.6 use
format instead of %% is in a way just syntactic sugar for a function that accepts a string and a *args (a format and the parameters for formatting) and returns a string which is the format string with the embedded parameters. So, you can use it any place that a string is acceptable.
BTW, % is a bit obsolete, and "{}{}".format(a,a) is the more 'modern' approach here, and is more obviously a string method that returns another string.
