Input with input()

print() works fine for printing static (unchanging) messages to the screen. If we wanted to print a phrase greeting a specific user, then print("Hello, Dave.") would be OK as long as Dave is the actual user.

What if we want to greet someone else? We could change the string inside the () to be 'Hello, Sarah' or 'Hello, Elastigirl' or any other name we need. However, this is inefficient. Also, what if we do not know the name of the user beforehand? We need to make our code more general and able to respond to different conditions.

It would be great if we could ask the user to enter a name, store that string in a variable, and then print a personalized greeting using print(). Variables to the rescue!

Requesting Data

To personalize the greeting, we have to get input from the user. This involves displaying a prompt on the screen (e.g. “Please enter a number: “), and then waiting for the user to respond. Whatever information the user enters gets stored for later use.

As we saw earlier, each programming language has its own way of accomplishing the same task. The Python syntax is input("Please enter your name: ").

If we want to get user input to print a customized greeting, we can do the following:

user = input("Please enter your name: ")
print("Hello " + user + "!")

Critical Input Detail

There is one very important quirk about the input function that we need to remember. Given print(7 + 2), the output would be 9.

Now explore the following code located in the data-analysis-projects/data-and-variables directory, which prompts the user for two numbers and then prints their sum.

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num1 = input("Enter a number: ")
num2 = input("Enter another number: ")

print(num1 + num2)

Run the program, enter your choice of numbers, and examine the output. Do you see what you expected?

If we enter 7 and 2, we expect an output of 9. We do NOT expect 72, but that is the result printed. What gives?

The quirk with the input function is that it treats all entries as strings, so numbers get concatenated rather than added. Just like “Hello, " + “World” outputs as Hello, World, “7” + “2” outputs as 72.

If we want our program to perform math on the entered numbers, we must use type conversion to change the string values into numbers.

Check Your Understanding

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info = input("Please enter your age: ")
# The user enters 25.

print(type(info))

1. string
1. number
1. info
1. 25