Category: Coding

Import Function

Python is a general purpose language which means that it can be used to solve many different tasks. However Python does not have a command for every single eventuality. So programmers have created document with lots of different functions, these are called module libraries.

The import command is used to import module libraries into python programs.

dice

The random module stores a number of functions, to get access to the function we want we must first import random then use dot notation to specify the function we want to call. So random.randint calls the randint function from the random module library we imported previously.

There are libraries to do many things and they all should come with documentation to make them easy to use. Like all python programs they are open source so you can have a look inside to see how they work. Here are some example

Python – print()

The print() function displays a string to the screen. It can be used like this.

  • print(“hello there”) – displays hello there
  • print(4*4) – displays 16
  • print(“4*4”) – displays 4*4

Note that the last line has quotes around the calculation causing the string to be displayed.

You can use either a single quote ‘ or double quotes ” within the brackets. More on this later.

Python – Input()

Python input() function returns a string to the assigned variable. This can cause us problems when we want to store integers or floats.

We can use the int() function to convert the string to a integer or the float() function to convert it to a floating point. It is better to do this when you get the input or initialise the variable as you may forget later in the program.

InputInt
The first block of code shows Python returning a string. The second block of code uses a int() to return an Integer