DEV Community

30 Days of Python 👨‍💻 - Day 2 - Data Types I

Arindam Dawn on June 22, 2020

Before diving deep into the nitty-gritty details of a programming language or perhaps even a human language, we need to understand its terminologie...

Read full post

Adrian Mowat • Jun 25 '20

One thing I found strange about strings in Python is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a material difference between using single and double quotes. In other languages, string interpolation only works inside doubles and singles are treated as exact literals but strong formatting in python works differently (as I’m sure you’ll find soon). The only time I can see a need to choose one over the other is when you have quotes inside your strings. Maybe someone can correct me on this or point out the relevant idiom. Still, keep up the good work man. I waited to long to invest time in learning Python and I have to say it’s been a real joy since I started a few months ago.

Arindam Dawn • Jun 25 '20

After reading some articles and blog posts I found out that:

%-format method is a very old method for interpolation and is not recommended to use as it decreases the code readability.
In str.format() method we pass the string object to the format() function for string interpolation.
In the template method, we make a template by importing template class from built-in string module.
Literal String Interpolation method is powerful interpolation method which is easy to use and increase the code readability.

I am still figuring out the best practices but I personally like the f syntax.

And yes learning python is a real joy. Hope I keep getting better at it :) Thanks for reading the blog.

Adrian Mowat • Jun 26 '20

Yeah me too. f'{}...' usually meets my needs and I only use format when I need to use printf style formatting or the expression I want to print is complex enough to impact readability inside a simple interpolation.

I believe the %-format approach is from python2 and str.format() is preferred in python3. You still see it a lot though.

Fady khallaf • Jul 20 '20

"Variables must start with a lowercase letter" can you edit this line because Python variables can start with uppercase letters as well. the variable in python must start with a letter or underscore (letter can be a capital uppercase or lowercase), it can't start with a number or special character.