Printing tuple with string formatting in Python

Question

So, i have this problem. I got tuple (1,2,3) which i should print with string formatting. eg. tup = (1,2,3) print "this is a tuple %something" % (tup)

and this should print tuple representation with brackets, like This is a tuple (1,2,3)

How in the world am I able to do this? Kinda lost here so if you guys could point me to a right direction :)

Answer 1

Check out the pprint module.

Answer 2

This doesn't use string formatting, but you should be able to do:

print 'this is a tuple ', (1, 2, 3)

If you really want to use string formatting:

print 'this is a tuple %s' % str((1, 2, 3))
# or
print 'this is a tuple %s' % ((1, 2, 3),)

Note, this assumes you are using a Python version earlier than 3.0.

Answer 3

>>> thetuple = (1, 2, 3)
>>> print "this is a tuple: %s" % (thetuple,)
this is a tuple: (1, 2, 3)

Making a singleton tuple with the tuple of interest as the only item, i.e. the (thetuple,) part, is the key bit here.

Answer 4

>>> tup = (1, 2, 3)
>>> print "Here it is: %s" % (tup,)
Here it is: (1, 2, 3)
>>>

Note that (tup,) is a tuple containing a tuple. The outer tuple is the argument to the % operator. The inner tuple is its content, which is actually printed.

(tup) is an expression in brackets, which when evaluated results in tup.

(tup,) with the trailing comma is a tuple, which contains tup as is only member.

Answer 5

t = (1, 2, 3)

# the comma (,) concatenates the strings and adds a space
print "this is a tuple", (t)

# format is the most flexible way to do string formatting
print "this is a tuple {0}".format(t)

# classic string formatting
# I use it only when working with older Python versions
print "this is a tuple %s" % repr(t)
print "this is a tuple %s" % str(t)

Answer 6

I think the best way to do this is:

t = (1,2,3)

print "This is a tuple: %s" % str(t)

If you're familiar with printf style formatting, then Python supports its own version. In Python, this is done using the "%" operator applied to strings (an overload of the modulo operator), which takes any string and applies printf-style formatting to it.

In our case, we are telling it to print "This is a tuple: ", and then adding a string "%s", and for the actual string, we're passing in a string representation of the tuple (by calling str(t)).

If you're not familiar with printf style formatting, I highly suggest learning, since it's very standard. Most languages support it in one way or another.