[Tutor] Prompting and graphics

[Andy W]

Hi Mike,

> I've got a couple of questions.  First one has to do with prompting a user
> for data and reading it in, i'm from the C++ world and used to using cin
> and cout statements.

You can use either of two functions (there might be other more obscure
ways):

input(prompt)
raw_input(prompt)

They work essentially the same, but "input" evaluates the data read, whereas
"raw_input" does not. This can be dangerous if your program is open to
malicious users, who could (the most frequently used example i've seen) open
a file for writing, thus truncating it. (by supplying the input prompt with
"open('important_file','w')".

Here's how raw_input works:

>>> x=raw_input('!> ')
!> 123
>>> x
'123'

Following on with "input"...

>>> input('eval: ')
eval: x
'1'

(Of course I could have put that into a variable, I just wanted to show the
evaluation part)

>
> Second, i've heard that I can graphically display some of my data.  Is
> there a seperate module I have to import?

There's a number of GUIs for Python. You will need to import a separate
module (and in non-Tkinter cases, download too).
Tkinter is the official Python GUI, but there are others such as, one which
I quite like, wxPython.

Tkinter resources:
http://www.python.org/topics/tkinter/

wxPython:
http://www.wxpython.org/

>
> Thanks,
> Mike

HTH,
Andrew

>
>
>
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