Python Essentials For Dummies

Chapter 8

Wrangling Bigger Chunks of Code

IN THIS CHAPTER

Creating your own function

Including a comment in a function

Seeing how to pass information to a function

Returning values from a function

In this chapter, you learn how to better manage larger code projects by creating your own functions. Functions provide a way to compartmentalize your code into small tasks that can be called from multiple places in an app. For example, if something you need to access throughout the app requires a dozen lines of code, chances are you don’t want to repeat that code over and over every time you need it. Doing so just makes the code larger than it needs to be. Also, if you want to change something, or if you have to fix an error in that code, you don’t want to have to do it repeatedly in a bunch of different places. If all that code were contained in a function, you would have to change or fix it in only one location.

To access the task that the function performs, you call the function from your code, just as you call a built-in function such as print. In other words, you just type the name ...