F-Strings Conclusion—Go Forth and Format!

Great!

Great tutorial! Thanks

f-Strings are somewhat smart! Thanks

ExcellentTutorial. ShameThisCommentsBoxSpacebarDoesntWorkItJustSeemsToActAsThePauseButton.

Thanks davebmw325, I mentioned the issue of the spacebar not working to Dan. Were you using a mobile device (phone or tablet) at the time? I experienced the same thing when I tried to reply from my iPad.

@davebmw325: Thanks for the heads up :) This was an issue with the comments field that affected Safari on iOS. I’m rolling out a fix now, so this should be resolved shortly.

Thank you Chris for this course.

Many thanks for taking us though the concepts from Old String Formating to New F string formatting.. Highly recommended to the python folks…

Thanks you Chris, it is very useful and allowed me to understand some messy syntaxes used by some developers around strings.

Always informative and right to the point Chris!

THanks a lot.

Excellent - thank you!

Thanks for reviewing the old style of formatting in addition to the f-string. I especially liked your discussion about the use of different type of quotes and triple quote usage.

Yes, thanks. Two questions (or maybe 3): a) Are there other “special” flags that trigger different behaviors such as “!r” to use the representation rather than string? b) Are there flags and format codes as in “old style” to get output presentations precisely the way one would wish (decimals to certain number of places, time formats, etc.), c) Is there another course or video showing such depths?

Hi @Zarata,

a) Yes. There are a couple of others, !s Convert with str(), !a Convert with ascii()

b) Yes. The old style flags work here also.

>>> temperature = 78.8765
>>> print(f'Today it was {temperature:.2f}') # Float to 2 decimal places
Today it was 78.87

c) Not a course as of yet, but a detailed article here on Real Python. A Guide to the Newer Python String Format Techniques This covers the old style .format() methods, which f-strings support, and the conversions. I hope this helps!

Thank you

Hi Chris! Thanks for the course. Am I right saying that f-strings feature all the same functionality as the previous % and <str>.fortmat() formatting methods? Or, is there any functionality which f-strings do not provide? Cheers.

Hi DoubleA, I’m so glad you enjoyed the course. Yes, the formatting methods are mostly the same. This course shows of more of them in action. The <format_spec> Component

And this article has a specific section talking about the limitations: A Guide to the Newer Python String Format Techniques: f-String Expression Limitations

I hope this helps.

Thank you so much for the references. Going to check those out! Keep on delivering the great stuff! 🔥🔥🔥

This is absolutely amazing!

Thanks for this. I will be using f-strings from here on.

Feel free to laugh, my way of doing things before was to do like this:

print(‘This is the start ‘+str(variable_name)+’ and this is the end.’)

If you ask me, this is more like f-strings in terms of how it reads than either %-formatting or the .format method. Maybe that is why I was intuitively drawn to it!

Thank You!

Thanks for this tutorial.

I would like to display a float number with a number of decimals specified as a function argument.

”% style” works:

def format(float_number, decimal_places):
    return '%.*f' % (decimal_places, float_number) 
    # format(pi, 2) returns 3.14; format(pi, 3) returns 3.142 etc.

But all attempts to accomplish this with f-strings have so far failed. For example, I tried this:

def format(float_number, decimal_places):
    specifier = f':.{decimal_places}f'
    return f'{float_number}{specifier}'
    # format(pi,2) returns 3.141592653589793:.2f

Everything else I’ve tried either just returns the number with format specifier appended, as above, or results in “ValueError: Invalid format specifier”.

Is it possible to replicate this functionality using an f-string?

Hi @amack604, yes you can do this with an f-string:

from math import pi

def format(float_number, decimal_places):
    return f'{float_number:.{decimal_places + 1}}'

format(pi, 2)  # 3.14
format(pi, 3)  # 3.142

There’s a LOT you can do with that string formatting mini-language, which I think you already know about. :)

For applying some of the specifiers in f-strings as variables, seems like you need to use another set of squiggly braces in order to input the value.

Thanks very much, Martin. Thought I’d tried the same nesting you used, but obviously not! :)

Interestingly, this code yields the same result as yours:

def format(float_number, decimal_places):
    return f'{float_number:.{decimal_places}f}'

Oh! Well that’s 100 times more beautiful than mine @amack604 😃

I did wonder about why I’d have to add 1 but was too lazy to play around with it more 😂…

Nice work! 🙌

Liked it! Gives tips and study guidance for those starting out. we learned the evolution of f’ in python writing, and how to make it as pythonic as possible and current.

If you would like to add a small disadvantage of f-strings, it is that they are immediate. If you wanted to send, say a string template and a dictionary into a function that would “apply” the f-string to the dictionary, it wont work. E.g. using f-strings for different ways of formatting a Date. There a .format would probably work better.

@Erik Dyrelius yes that’s a good point! They’re not helpful for templating. We’re currently updating the tutorial that this course is based and are also including that aspect. :)