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Paul Resendez
2,990 PointsShopping List Introduction
At 4:30ish in the Shopping List Introduction video I am unclear as to what Kenneth is doing. He talks about using a simple prompt and uses a single '> ' symbol. Could someone help me out by elaborating on this? What exactly is he doing? Please help!
Paul Resendez
2,990 PointsGreat! I understand. Thanks!
1 Answer
Chris Freeman
Treehouse Moderator 68,454 PointsThe prompt can be any text string. The use of "*> *" is an arbitrary example. Whatever string is used as the argument to the input() function will be displayed to the user. Sometimes a specific question can be used as a prompt:
input("What do you need? ")
Yields
What do you need?
The cursor is left at the end of the prompt. A space is often left at the end if the prompt string to leave a visual gap between the prompt and the users input.
More info in Python docs input()
Paul Resendez
2,990 PointsGreat! I understand. Thanks!
r h
68,552 Pointsr h
68,552 PointsWhat you are doing is actually creating a prompt yourself. Back in the day, when you coded in BASIC, whenever a prompt was needed from the user a ">" appeared on screen to the left of the cursor, which indicated that an input was required. This is a reference to BASIC stylization, because he wants us to input("> ") with the text that appears on screen just the "> " prompt. It's not even code, it's just a string. In other words, it could be input("Insert something to buy: ") and the cursor would wait to the right of the colon (:). > is just an abbreviation for input visually on the screen, not a python command or anything.