Developers often have a need to interact with users, either to get data or to provide some sort of result. Most programs today use a dialog box as a way of asking the user to provide some type of input. While Python provides us with two inbuilt functions to read the input from the keyboard.
- input ( prompt )
- raw_input ( prompt )
input ( ) : This function first takes the input from the user and then evaluates the expression, which means Python automatically identifies whether user entered a string or a number or list. If the input provided is not correct then either syntax error or exception is raised by python. For example –
# Python program showing # a use of input() val = input("Enter your value: ") print(val) |
Output:
How the input function works in Python :
- When
input()function executes program flow will be stopped until the user has given an input. - The text or message display on the output screen to ask a user to enter input value is optional i.e. the prompt, will be printed on the screen is optional.
- Whatever you enter as input, input function convert it into a string. if you enter an integer value still
input()function convert it into a string. You need to explicitly convert it into an integer in your code using typecasting.
Code:
# Program to check input # type in Python num = input ("Enter number :") print(num) name1 = input("Enter name : ") print(name1) # Printing type of input value print ("type of number", type(num)) print ("type of name", type(name1)) |
Output :
raw_input ( ) : This function works in older version (like Python 2.x). This function takes exactly what is typed from the keyboard, convert it to string and then return it to the variable in which we want to store. For example –
# Python program showing # a use of raw_input() g = raw_input("Enter your name : ") print g |
Output :
Here, g is a variable which will get the string value, typed by user during the execution of program. Typing of data for the raw_input() function is terminated by enter key. We can use raw_input() to enter numeric data also. In that case we use typecasting.For more details on typecasting refer this.
Refer to the article Taking list as input from the user for more information.
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