Formatting the Little Things

Python’s formatting method is my favorite code discovery of the week.

The formatter responds to replacement fields surrounded by curly braces, enveloped in a string. Call the “format” method on the string, specifying which values to place inside those curly braces and ta-da, beauty.

You can even define your own formatting object. Here’s an example to help format one of life’s most difficult questions:

class DeepThought(object):
  def __format__(self, format):
      if (format == 'answer-to-ultimate-question'):
      	 return "42."
      return "What's the question?"
      
print "{:answer-to-ultimate-question}".format(DeepThought()) <b></b>

42.

In sum,

num = 100.033452
adj = "real"
print "Things just got {0}. And {1:0.0f} times prettier.".format(adj,num) <b></b>

Things just got real. And 100 times prettier.

July 27, 2015