{"id":527,"date":"2018-03-02T05:54:37","date_gmt":"2018-03-02T05:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.afternerd.com\/blog\/?p=527"},"modified":"2019-01-13T03:33:02","modified_gmt":"2019-01-13T03:33:02","slug":"how-to-print-without-a-newline-in-python","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.afternerd.com\/blog\/how-to-print-without-a-newline-in-python\/","title":{"rendered":"Python: How to Print Without Newline? (The Idiomatic Way)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jump straight to the solution:<\/p>\n

Printing without a newline in Python3<\/a><\/p>\n

Printing without a newline in Python2<\/a><\/p>\n

The Problem<\/h2>\n

Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn.<\/p>\n

One of the first programs that you write when you start learning any new programming language is a\u00a0hello world<\/em><\/a> program.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0hello world<\/em> program in python looks like this<\/p>\n

# hello world in python\r\nprint(\"Hello World!\")\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
It is that easy!<\/p>\n
Just one line and boom you have your hello world program.<\/p>\n
In Python 3, print() is a function<\/a> that prints out things onto the screen (print was a statement in Python 2)<\/a>.<\/p>\n
As you can see, it is a very simple function.<\/p>\n
Yet there is one thing that is really annoying about this function.<\/p>\n
It automatically prints a newline ‘\\n’ at the end of the line!<\/p>\n
Let’s take a look at this example<\/p>\n
print(\"Hello World!\")\r\nprint(\"My name is Karim\")\r\n# output:\r\n# Hello World!\r\n# My name is Karim<\/code><\/pre>\n
As you can notice, the two strings are not printed one after the other on the same line but on separate lines instead.<\/p>\n
Even though this might be what you actually want, but that’s not always the case.<\/p>\n
if you’re coming from another language, you might be more comfortable with explicitly mentioning whether a newline should be printed out or not.<\/p>\n
For example in Java, you have to explicitly indicate your desire to print a newline by either using the println function or typing the newline character (\\n) inside your print function:<\/p>\n
\/\/ option 1\r\nSystem.out.println(\"Hello World!\")\r\n\/\/ option 2\r\nSystem.out.print(\"Hello World!\\n\")<\/code><\/pre>\n
So what should we do if we want no newline characters in python?<\/p>\n
Let’s jump right into the solution!<\/p>\n
The Solution<\/h2>\n
Printing with no newlines in Python 3<\/h3>\n
Python 3 provides the simplest solution, all you have to do is to provide one extra argument to the print function.<\/p>\n
# use the named argument \"end\" to explicitly specify the end of line string\r\nprint(\"Hello World!\", end = '')\r\nprint(\"My name is Karim\")\r\n# output:\r\n# Hello World!My name is Karim\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
You can use the optional named argument end<\/strong> to explicitly mention the string that should be appended at the end of the line.<\/p>\n
Whatever you provide as the\u00a0end\u00a0<\/strong>argument is going to be the terminating string.<\/p>\n
So if you provide an empty string, then no newline characters, and no spaces will be appended to your input.<\/p>\n
Printing with no newlines in Python 2<\/h3>\n
In python 2, the easiest way to avoid the terminating newline is to use a comma at the end of your print statement<\/p>\n
# no newlines but a space will be printed out\r\nprint \"Hello World!\",\r\nprint \"My name is Karim\"\r\n# output\r\n# Hello World! My name is Karim\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
As you can see, even though there was no newlines, we still got a space character between the two print statements.<\/p>\n
If you actually needed a space, then this is the simplest and most straightforward way to go.<\/p>\n
But what if you want to print without a space or newline?<\/p>\n
In this you can, you should use the all-powerful sys.stdout.write\u00a0<\/strong>function from the sys<\/a> module.<\/p>\n
This function will only print whatever you explicitly tell it to print.<\/p>\n
There are no terminating strings.<\/p>\n
There is no magic!<\/p>\n
Let’s take an example<\/p>\n
import sys\r\n\r\nsys.stdout.write(\"Hello World!\")\r\nsys.stdout.write(\"My name is Karim\")\r\n# output\r\n# Hello World!My name is Karim\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
In Python 3, you can use the named\u00a0end\u00a0<\/strong>argument in the print function and assign an empty string to this argument to prevent the terminating newline.<\/p>\n
In Python 2, you can either use a comma after your print statement if you don’t mind the space, or you can just use the\u00a0sys.stdout.write()<\/strong> function<\/p>\n
Learning Python?<\/h3>\n
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