Exercise 12: Prompting People

When you typed raw_input() you were typing the ( and ) characters which are parenthesis. This is similar to when you used them to do a format with extra variables, as in "%s %s" % (x, y). For raw_input you can also put in a prompt to show to a person so they know what to type. Put a string that you want for the prompt inside the () so that it looks like this:

y = raw_input("Name? ")

This prompts the user with "Name?" and puts the result into the variable y. This is how you ask someone a question and get their answer.

This means we can completely rewrite our previous exercise using just raw_input to do all the prompting.

age = raw_input("How old are you? ")
height = raw_input("How tall are you? ")
weight = raw_input("How much do you weigh? ")

print "So, you're %r old, %r tall and %r heavy." % (
    age, height, weight)

What You Should See

$ python ex12.py
How old are you? 35
How tall are you? 6'2"
How much do you weight? 180lbs
So, you're '35' old, '6\'2"' tall and '180lbs' heavy.
$

Extra Credit

1. In Terminal where you normally run python to run your scripts, type: pydoc raw_input. Read what it says. If you're on Windows try python -m pydoc raw_input instead.
2. Get out of pydoc by typing q to quit.
3. Go look online for what the pydoc command does.
4. Use pydoc to also read about open, file, os, and sys. It's alright if you do not understand those, just read through and take notes about interesting things.