Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: The Python print() Function: Go Beyond the Basics
If you’re like most Python users, including me, then you probably started your Python journey by learning about print(). It helped you write your very own hello world one-liner. You can use it to display formatted messages onto the screen and perhaps find some bugs. But if you think that’s all there is to know about Python’s print() function, then you’re missing out on a lot!
Keep reading to take full advantage of this seemingly boring and unappreciated little function. This tutorial will get you up to speed with using Python print() effectively. However, prepare for a deep dive as you go through the sections. You may be surprised how much print() has to offer!
By the end of this tutorial, you’ll know how to:
- Avoid common mistakes with Python’s
print() - Deal with newlines, character encodings, and buffering
- Write text to files
- Mock
print()in unit tests - Build advanced user interfaces in the terminal
If you’re a complete beginner, then you’ll benefit most from reading the first part of this tutorial, which illustrates the essentials of printing in Python. Otherwise, feel free to skip that part and jump around as you see fit.
Note: print() was a major addition to Python 3, in which it replaced the old print statement available in Python 2.
There were a number of good reasons for that, as you’ll see shortly. Although this tutorial focuses on Python 3, it does show the old way of printing in Python for reference.
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Printing in a Nutshell
Let’s jump in by looking at a few real-life examples of printing in Python. By the end of this section, you’ll know every possible way of calling print(). Or, in programmer lingo, you’d say you’ll be familiar with the function signature.
Calling print()
The simplest example of using Python print() requires just a few keystrokes:
>>> print()
You don’t pass any arguments, but you still need to put empty parentheses at the end, which tell Python to actually execute the function rather than just refer to it by name.
This will produce an invisible newline character, which in turn will cause a blank line to appear on your screen. You can call print() multiple times like this to add vertical space. It’s just as if you were hitting Enter on your keyboard in a word processor.
A newline character is a special control character used to indicate the end of a line (EOL). It usually doesn’t have a visible representation on the screen, but some text editors can display such non-printable characters with little graphics.
The word “character” is somewhat of a misnomer in this case, because a newline is often more than one character long. For example, the Windows operating system, as well as the HTTP protocol, represent newlines with a pair of characters. Sometimes you need to take those differences into account to design truly portable programs.