Think Python

Chapter 5. Conditionals and Recursion

Modulus Operator

The modulus operator works on integers and yields the remainder when the first operand is divided by the second. In Python, the modulus operator is a percent sign (%). The syntax is the same as for other operators:

>>> quotient = 7 / 3
>>> print quotient
2
>>> remainder = 7 % 3
>>> print remainder
1

So 7 divided by 3 is 2 with 1 left over.

The modulus operator turns out to be surprisingly useful. For example, you can check whether one number is divisible by another—if x % y is zero, then x is divisible by y.

Also, you can extract the right-most digit or digits from a number. For example, x % 10 yields the right-most digit of x (in base 10). Similarly x % 100 yields the last two digits.

Boolean Expressions

A Boolean expression is an expression that is either true or false. The following examples use the operator ==, which compares two operands and produces True if they are equal and False otherwise:

>>> 5 == 5
True
>>> 5 == 6
False

True and False are special values that belong to the type bool; they are not strings:

>>> type(True)
<type 'bool'>
>>> type(False)
<type 'bool'>

The == operator is one of the relational operators; the others are:

      x != y               # x is not equal to y
      x > y                # x is greater than y
      x < y                # x is less than y
      x >= y               # x is greater than or equal to y
      x <= y               # x is less than or equal to y

Although these operations are probably familiar to you, the Python symbols are different from the mathematical symbols. A common error is to ...