[Tutor] Newline

[Walter Prins]

Hello Ava/Ashley

On 4 December 2010 01:47, Ashley Blackwell <georgeandsnickerdoodle at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Exactly what is a newline character?


Not all characters used to encode information are printable/displayable
characters like the letters in the alphabet or numerals or punctuation and
symbols.  There's several "special" characters that have special meanings
and represent other things.  A "newline character" is such a character.  It
is character 13 in the ASCII character set (which is a well known encoding
standard that define a mapping between bytes of data and characters.   See
here: http://www.asciitable.com/ )  It's meaning is "start a new line"
instead of encoding "a" or "z" or "#" or whatever.


> I keep reading the same section of the book and I'm just not really
> understanding. Here's the code that the book uses to explain the newline
> character:
>
> print("Here", end="  ")
> print("it is...")
>
> The book says that I can specify that a space be the final character
> printed instead of a newline. In the first print() statement I specify that
> a space be the final string printed. So the text "Here" appears but no
> newline character. The next print() statement prints the text "it is"..."
> right after the space following the final "e" in the "Here" text. You do it
> by passing a space to the end parameter of the print() function with the
> code end"  ".
>

So, what this is trying to explain is that by default Python appends a
newline character to the end of whatever it's been told to print.  This has
the effect of normally puttig successive print statements on successive
lines.  However, you can override this behaviour and tell Python to use
another character as its "end" character to append to whatever is printed,
by specifying the "end" parameter.   If you for example replace this with
space e.g. " " then as you can see when you execute the 2 print statements
they end up on one line, seperated by thace space, instead of being on 2
seperate lines.

Does that help?

Walter
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