Output Formatting

To get output like this,

instead of this,

Build a print statement with the string,

[Below is the output of each print statement.]{style="font-size: 0.9375rem;"}\

The formatting codes used in the second print statement are derived from those originally used by the language C and now also used by the languages C++, AWK, Perl, and PHP among others. Each format placeholder has the form,

%[optional arguments]letter

The % sign indicates the beginning of a placeholder.

Although all of these options are valid in Python 3 we will be using option 4, the f-string, because that is currently considered best practice. I also think it the easist to read!

The letter indicates the desired format:

All these take an optional argument specifying the width of the field in which the value should be displayed, e.g.

The floating point code takes an additional argument specifying the number of digits to display to the right of the decimal point, e.g.

Note that if a field width is narrower than the value to be displayed the field is enlarged to fit the value, e.g.

this can be helpful when you want to insert numerical values into sentences (rather than some tabular format), e.g.

If you need to display multiple values enclose the interpolating variables in parentheses, e.g.

There is much more to string formatting than is shown here. For the details start with the Python Library Reference Section 7. More details can be found in the Gnu AWK manual Section 5.2