"Matthew Warren" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Print "There are "+number+" ways to skin a "+furryanimal
>
> But nowadays, I see things like this all over the place;
>
> print("There are %s ways to skin a %s" % (number, furryanimal))
>
> Now I understand there can be additional formatting benefits when
> dealing with numbers, decimal places etc.. But to me, for strings, the
> second case is much harder to read than the first.
>
apart from the spurious parentheses you added in the second one, you also
missed out this variant:
print "There are", number, "ways to skin a", furryanimal
That only works for print though, not for other uses of strings, but it is
related to the main reason I use format strings instead of concatenation.
The problem I have with your first option is the large number of times I've
written:
print "There are"+number+"ways to skin a"+furryanimal
or at least something equivalent to it. If I try to make the same mistake
with a format string it jumps out to me as wrong:
"There are%sways to skin a%s" % (number, furryanimal)
Also, having a variable of type str called 'number' seems perverse (and
probably error prone), so I suspect I might need something like:
print "There are "+str(number)+" ways to skin a "+furryanimal
but the format string does the conversion for free.
The other main reason for preferring format strings is that they make it
easier to refactor the code. If you ever want to move the message away from
where the formatting is done then it's a lot easier to extract a single
string than it is to clean up the concatenation.
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