[Tutor] String Replacement question

[Kent Johnson]

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 5:35 AM, Faheem <faheem at atlantiscomputing.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>  How do I replace the same value multiple times without repeating the
> same variable name/value repeatedly?
> for ex.
>
>  some = 'thing'
>  print '%s %s %s %s' % (some,some,some,some)

You can use named parameters, which moves the repetition to the format string:

In [24]: print '%(some)s %(some)s %(some)s %(some)s' % (dict(some=some))
thing thing thing thing

With multiple values, a common trick is to pass vars() or locals() as
the dict, giving the format access to all defined variables:

In [27]: a=1

In [28]: b=2

In [29]: print '%(a)s %(b)s' % vars()
1 2

If you literally need to repeat as in your example, you could do this:

In [26]: print '%s %s %s %s' % (4*(some,))
thing thing thing thing

Kent