Python Formatting

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video I want to take just a couple of minutes and
• 00:06 talk about Python formatting.
• 00:08 And the reason why we're doing it now is we're starting to see with these
• 00:11 conditional statements different formatting things that we haven't
• 00:15 seen before.
• 00:15 So Python is very particular about spaces inside of blocks of code like this.
• 00:21 So here you see, like I mentioned, I just hit the tab key on my keyboard, and
• 00:26 it popped it over.
• 00:27 It really doesn't matter how far over you go, it just has to be consistent.
• 00:33 So, we could do print that, we could do, Hello there!,
• 00:37 whatever, and this will work as long as they're consistent.
• 00:42 Now, if we save this and write num greater than 5, Hello there.
• 00:47 Change this to 1, save and run it, num is not greater than 5, this still works.
• 00:52 So you'll notice these two blocks of code are indented differently.
• 00:56 I don't recommend that you do that you want to be consistent.
• 00:59 But in this case, it does work,
• 01:01 because as long as your specific blocks are indented the same, you're good.
• 01:06 So this is a block of code right here.
• 01:09 This is a second block of code.
• 01:10 And these two blocks of code don't have to be indented the same but
• 01:13 they really should be.
• 01:14 On the other hand if we went like this, and let's change this back to 6.
• 01:20 And if we save this, we're already getting error here, so
• 01:23 I think you know what's going to happen, boom, we get a big error.
• 01:26 Because inside of your block, your formatting,
• 01:29 your indentation has to be the same.
• 01:31 So just get in the habit of hitting the Tab key whenever you need to indent blocks
• 01:35 of code and you should be okay.
• 01:37 That's one sort of weird formatting thing in Python.
• 01:40 This is not the case for other programming languages.
• 01:42 JavaScript uses brackets and things like that to tell blocks of code.
• 01:48 Every programming language is different, Python uses these indentations, so
• 01:52 that's one thing.
• 01:53 The next thing I want to talk about is blank lines, and
• 01:55 this is sort of a formatting issue as well.
• 01:57 Python just completely ignores blank lines, so you could do this, right?
• 02:01 And this whole ifelse then it will still evaluate the same way,
• 02:05 Python just ignores all of these spaces that we've created, right?
• 02:09 Obviously you're not going to want to do that, but I find it useful to sort of,
• 02:13 use white space here in there to break apart blocks of code.
• 02:16 Just makes it easier to read, you might have a comment,
• 02:22 this is my conditional statement.
• 02:26 And in front of that you might want to add a little bit of space, whatever,
• 02:30 Python will ignore spaces, so that's handy to know.
• 02:33 So that's another formatting issue.
• 02:34 The last formatting thing I want to talk about is you can do a lot of stuff on one
• 02:38 line if you wanted to.
• 02:40 So we could say num_2 = 10.
• 02:45 Num_3 = 100.
• 02:49 And just keep going, and separate these things with semicolons.
• 02:53 Lost our colon, there we go.
• 02:55 Now, do I recommend that you do that?
• 02:56 No, probably not, but you can do it if you want to, Python allows that sort of thing.
• 03:02 Also, you can go, name = John,
• 03:11 Elder print(name), in fact we can just
• 03:16 remove all this, make it easier to read.
• 03:21 Save, run it again, okay, so John Elder.
• 03:23 So, we're adding multiple things using this backslash so
• 03:27 you can put things on multiple lines.
• 03:29 That's one formating thing that's kind of interesting.
• 03:31 So all on one line, you could use that.
• 03:34 Multiple lines, you can use that.
• 03:36 And you could see it smooshes out John Elder into name even though this is on
• 03:41 multiple lines.
• 03:42 Finally, very quickly, we can do one line if statements too.
• 03:47 So, Python will allow you to string these things along just like this,
• 03:52 we run this, num is greater than 5 all on one line.
• 03:55 I don't recommend that you ever do that because it's just hard to read, right?
• 03:58 A lot of times your if statement will have multiple things.
• 04:01 You're going to have another print, another print, whatever, and
• 04:05 you just don't want to put all those things on one line.
• 04:08 But in a pinch, you can do that, and
• 04:09 there are certain circumstances where you might want to do that.
• 04:12 So those are just some Python formatting issues that I wanted to address.
• 04:16 Pretty simple, we'll see these moving forward.
• 04:18 In the next video we're going to look at membership operators.

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