Python Morsels: String Formatting Techniques

Table of contents

1. What are we talking about?
2. Definitions
3. Example f-strings
4. Formatting numbers
5. Formatting strings
6. Formatting datetime objects
7. Forcing a programmer-readable representation
8. Self-documenting expressions & debugging
9. Cheat sheets
10. Summary

What are we talking about?

Python's string formatting syntax allows us to inject objects (often other strings) into our strings.

>>> name="Trey">>> print(f"My name is {name}. What's your name?")My name is Trey. What's your name?

>>> name="Trey">>> print(f"My name is {name}. What's your name?")My name is Trey. What's your name?

We can even embed expressions:

>>> name="Trey">>> print(f"{name}, which starts with {name[0]}")Trey, which starts with T

>>> name="Trey">>> print(f"{name}, which starts with {name[0]}")Trey, which starts with T

But Python's string formatting syntax also allows us to control the formatting of each of these string components.

There is a lot of complexity in Python's string formatting syntax. If you're just for quick answers, skip to the cheat sheets section.

Definitions

Let's start with some definitions. …