The
print statement simply prints objects.
Technically, it writes the textual representation of objects to the
standard output stream. The standard output stream happens to be the
same as the C stdout stream and usually maps to
the window where you started your Python program (unless you’ve
redirected it to a file in your system’s shell).
In Chapter 2, we also saw file methods that write
text. The print statement is similar, but more
focused: print writes objects to the
stdout stream (with some default formatting), but
file write methods write strings to files. Since
the standard output stream is available in Python as the
stdout object in the built-in
sys module (aka sys.stdout),
it’s possible to emulate print with file
writes (see below), but print is easier to use.
Table 3.4 lists the
print
statement’s forms.
Table 3-4. Print Statement Forms
|
Operation |
Interpretation |
|---|---|
print spam, ham |
Print objects to |
print spam, ham, |
Same, but don’t add newline at end |
By default, print adds a space between items
separated by commas and adds a linefeed at the end of the current
output line. To suppress the linefeed (so you can add more text on
the same line later), end your print statement
with a comma, as shown in the second line of the table. To suppress
the space between items, you can instead build up an output string
using the string concatenation and formatting tools in Chapter 2:
>>>print "a", "b"a b >>>print "a" + "b"ab >>>print "%s...%s" % ...