Python Application Programming

MODULE – 2
ITERATION
Iteration is a processing repeating some task. In a real time programming, we require a set of
statements to be repeated certain number of times and/or till a condition is met. Every programming
language provides certain constructs to achieve the repetition of tasks. In this section, we will
discuss various such looping structures.

The while Statement

The while loop has the syntax as below –

while condition:
statement_1
statement_2
…………….
statement_n

statements_after_while

Here, while is a keyword. The condition is evaluated first. Till its value remains true, the
statement_1 to statement_n will be executed. When the condition becomes false, the loop is
terminated and statements after the loop will be executed. Consider an example –

n=1
while n<=5:
print(n) #observe indentation n=n+1

print("over")

The output of above code segment would be –

1
2
3
4
5
over

In the above example, a variable n is initialized to 1. Then the condition n<=5 is being checked. As
the condition is true, the block of code containing print statement (print(n)) and increment statement
(n=n+1) are executed. After these two lines, condition is checked again. The procedure continues till
condition becomes false, that is when n becomes 6. Now, the while-loop is terminated and next
statement after the loop will be executed. Thus, in this example, the loop is iterated for 5 times.

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Note that, a variable n is initialized before starting the loop and it is incremented inside the loop.
Such a variable that changes its value for every iteration and controls the total execution of the loop
is called as iteration variable or counter variable. If the count variable is not updated properly
within the loop, then the loop may not terminate and keeps executing infinitely.

Infinite Loops, break and continue

A loop may execute infinite number of times when the condition is never going to become false. For
example,

n=1
while True:
print(n)
n=n+1

Here, the condition specified for the loop is the constant True, which will never get terminated.
Sometimes, the condition is given such a way that it will never become false and hence by restricting
the program control to go out of the loop. This situation may happen either due to wrong condition
or due to not updating the counter variable.

In some situations, we deliberately want to come out of the loop even before the normal termination
of the loop. For this purpose break statement is used. The following example depicts the usage of
break. Here, the values are taken from keyboard until a negative number is entered. Once the input is
found to be negative, the loop terminates.
while True:
x=int(input("Enter a number:")) if x>= 0:
print("You have entered ",x) else:
print("You have entered a negative number!!")
break #terminates the loop

Sample output:
Enter a number:23 You
have entered 23 Enter a
number:12 You have
entered 12 Enter a
number:45 You have
entered 45 Enter a number:0
You have entered 0 Enter a
number:-2
You have entered a negative number!!

In the above example, we have used the constant True as condition for while-loop, which will never
become false. So, there was a possibility of infinite loop. This has been avoided

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by using break statement with a condition. The condition is kept inside the loop such a way that, if
the user input is a negative number, the loop terminates. This indicates that, the loop may terminate
with just one iteration (if user gives negative number for the very first time) or it may take thousands
of iteration (if user keeps on giving only positive numbers as input). Hence, the number of iterations
here is unpredictable. But, we are making sure that it will not be an infinite-loop, instead, the user
has control on the loop.

Sometimes, programmer would like to move to next iteration by skipping few statements in the loop,
based on some condition. For this purpose continue statement is used. For example, we would like
to find the sum of 5 even numbers taken as input from the keyboard. The logic is –
 Read a number from the keyboard
 If that number is odd, without doing anything else, just move to next iteration for reading
another number
 If the number is even, add it to sum and increment the accumulator variable.
 When accumulator crosses 5, stop the program The

program for the above task can be written as –

sum=0 count=0
while True:
x=int(input("Enter a number:")) if x%2 !=0:
continue
else:
sum+=x
count+=1

if count==5:
break

print("Sum= ", sum)

Sample Output:
Enter a number:13 Enter
a number:12 Enter a
number:4 Enter a
number:5 Enter a
number:-3 Enter a
number:8 Enter a
number:7 Enter a
number:16 Enter a
number:6 Sum= 46

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Definite Loops using for

The while loop iterates till the condition is met and hence, the number of iterations are usually
unknown prior to the loop. Hence, it is sometimes called as indefinite loop. When we know total
number of times the set of statements to be executed, for loop will be used. This is called as a
definite loop. The for-loop iterates over a set of numbers, a set of words, lines in a file etc. The
syntax of for-loop would be –
for var in list/sequence:
statement_1
statement_2
………………
statement_n

statements_after_for

Here, for and in are keywords

list/sequence is a set of elements on which the loop is iterated. That is, the loop
will be executed till there is an element in list/sequence
statements constitutes body of the loop

Ex: In the below given example, a list names containing three strings has been created. Then the
counter variable x in the for-loop iterates over this list. The variable x takes the elements in names
one by one and the body of the loop is executed.

names=["Ram", "Shyam", "Bheem"] for x in

names:
print(x)

The output would be –

Ram
Shyam
Bheem

NOTE: In Python, list is an important data type. It can take a sequence of elements of different
types. It can take values as a comma separated sequence enclosed within square brackets. Elements
in the list can be extracted using index (just similar to extracting array elements in C/C++ language).
Various operations like indexing, slicing, merging, addition and deletion of elements etc. can be
applied on lists. The details discussion on Lists will be done in Module 3.

The for loop can be used to print (or extract) all the characters in a string as shown below –
for i in "Hello": print(i, end=’\t’)

Output:
H e l l o

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When we have a fixed set of numbers to iterate in a for loop, we can use a function
range(). The function range() takes the following format –
range(start, end, steps)

The start and end indicates starting and ending values in the sequence, where end is excluded in the
sequence (That is, sequence is up to end-1). The default value of start is 0. The argument steps
indicates the increment/decrement in the values of sequence with the default value as 1. Hence, the
argument steps is optional. Let us consider few examples on usage of range() function.

Ex1. Printing the values from 0 to 4 –

for i in range(5): print(i, end= ‘\t’)

Output:
0 1 2 3 4
Here, 0 is the default starting value. The statement range(5) is same as range(0,5)
and range(0,5,1).

Ex2. Printing the values from 5 to 1 –

for i in range(5,0,-1): print(i, end=
‘\t’)

Output:
5 4 3 2 1
The function range(5,0,-1)indicates that the sequence of values are 5 to 0(excluded) in steps of -1
(downwards).
Ex3. Printing only even numbers less than 10 –
for i in range(0,10,2): print(i,
end= ‘\t’)

Output:
0 2 4 6 8

Loop Patterns
The while-loop and for-loop are usually used to go through a list of items or the contents of a file and
to check maximum or minimum data value. These loops are generally constructed by the following
procedure –
 Initializing one or more variables before the loop starts
 Performing some computation on each item in the loop body, possibly changing the variables
in the body of the loop
 Looking at the resulting variables when the loop completes

The construction of these loop patterns are demonstrated in the following examples.

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Counting and Summing Loops: One can use the for loop for counting number of items in the list as
shown –
count = 0
for i in [4, -2, 41, 34, 25]:
count = count + 1
print(“Count:”, count)

Here, the variable count is initialized before the loop. Though the counter variable i is not being used
inside the body of the loop, it controls the number of iterations. The variable count is incremented in
every iteration, and at the end of the loop the total number of elements in the list is stored in it.

One more loop similar to the above is finding the sum of elements in the list –

total = 0
for x in [4, -2, 41, 34, 25]:
total = total + x
print(“Total:”, total)

Here, the variable total is called as accumulator because in every iteration, it accumulates the sum of
elements. In each iteration, this variable contains running total of values so far.

NOTE: In practice, both of the counting and summing loops are not necessary, because there are
built-in functions len()and sum() for the same tasks respectively.

Maximum and Minimum Loops: To find maximum element in the list, the following code can be
used –

big = None
print('Before Loop:', big) for x in [12,
0, 21,-3]:
if big is None or x > big : big = x
print('Iteration Variable:', x, 'Big:', big) print('Biggest:', big)

Output:
Before Loop: None
Iteration Variable: 12 Big: 12
Iteration Variable: 0 Big: 12
Iteration Variable: 21 Big: 21
Iteration Variable: -3 Big: 21
Biggest: 21

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Here, we initialize the variable big to None. It is a special constant indicating empty. Hence, we
cannot use relational operator == while comparing it with big. Instead, the is operator must be used.
In every iteration, the counter variable x is compared with previous value of big. If x > big, then x is
assigned to big.

Similarly, one can have a loop for finding smallest of elements in the list as given below –

small = None
print('Before Loop:', small) for x in [12,
0, 21,-3]:
if small is None or x < small : small = x
print('Iteration Variable:', x, 'Small:', small) print('Smallest:', small)

Output:
Before Loop: None
Iteration Variable: 12 Small: 12
Iteration Variable: 0 Small: 0
Iteration Variable: 21 Small: 0
Iteration Variable: -3 Small: -3
Smallest: -3

NOTE: In Python, there are built-in functions max() and min() to compute maximum and minimum
values among. Hence, the above two loops need not be written by the programmer explicitly. The
inbuilt function min()has the following code in Python –
def min(values):
smallest = None
for value in values:
if smallest is None or value < smallest: smallest = value
return smallest

STRINGS
A string is a sequence of characters, enclosed either within a pair of single quotes or double quotes.
Each character of a string corresponds to an index number, starting with zero as shown below –
S= “Hello World”

character H e l l o w o r l d
index 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The characters of a string can be accessed using index enclosed within square brackets. For
example,

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>>> word1="Hello"
>>> word2='hi'
>>> x=word1[1] #2nd character of word1 is extracted
>>> print(x) e
>>> y=word2[0] #1st character of word1 is extracted
>>> print(y) h

Python supports negative indexing of string starting from the end of the string as shown below –
S= “Hello World”

character H e l l o w o r l D
Negative index -11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1

The characters can be extracted using negative index also. For example,

>>> var=“Hello”
>>> print(var[-1]) o
>>> print(var[-4]) e

Whenever the string is too big to remember last positive index, one can use negative index to extract
characters at the end of string.

Getting Length of a String using len()

The len() function can be used to get length of a string.
>>> var="Hello"
>>> ln=len(var)
>>> print(ln)
5

The index for string varies from 0 to length-1. Trying to use the index value beyond this range
generates error.
>>> var="Hello"
>>> ln=len(var)
>>> ch=var[ln]
IndexError: string index out of range

Traversal through String with a Loop

Extracting every character of a string one at a time and then performing some action on that
character is known as traversal. A string can be traversed either using while loop or using for loop in
different ways. Few of such methods is shown here –

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 Using for loop:

st="Hello" for i in
st:
print(i, end='\t')

Output:
H e l l o

In the above example, the for loop is iterated from first to last character of the string st. That is, in
every iteration, the counter variable i takes the values as H, e, l, l and o. The loop terminates when
no character is left in st.

 Using while loop:

st="Hello" i=0
while i<len(st):
print(st[i], end=‘\t’) i+=1
Output:
H e l l o
In this example, the variable i is initialized to 0 and it is iterated till the length of the string. In
every iteration, the value of i is incremented by 1 and the character in a string is extracted using i
as index.

String Slices
A segment or a portion of a string is called as slice. Only a required number of characters can be
extracted from a string using colon (:) symbol. The basic syntax for slicing a string would be –
st[i:j:k]

This will extract character from ith character of st till (j-1)th character in steps of k. If first index i is
not present, it means that slice should start from the beginning of the string. If the second index j is
not mentioned, it indicates the slice should be till the end of the string. The third parameter k, also
known as stride, is used to indicate number of steps to be incremented after extracting first character.
The default value of stride is 1.

Consider following examples along with their outputs to understand string slicing.

st="Hello World" #refer this string for all examples

1. print("st[:] is", st[:]) #output Hello World

As both index values are not given, it assumed to be a full string.

2. print("st[0:5] is ", st[0:5]) #output is Hello

th th
Starting from 0 index to 4 index (5 is exclusive), characters will be printed.

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3. print("st[0:5:1] is", st[0:5:1]) #output is Hello

This code also prints characters from 0th to 4th index in the steps of 1. Comparing this
example with previous example, we can make out that when the stride value is 1, it is
optional to mention.

4. print("st[3:8] is ", st[3:8]) #output is lo Wo

Starting from 3rd index to 7th index (8 is exclusive), characters will be printed.

5. print("st[7:] is ", st[7:]) #output is orld

th
Starting from 7 index to till the end of string, characters will be printed.

6. print(st[::2]) #outputs HloWrd

This example uses stride value as 2. So, starting from first character, every alternative
character (char+2) will be printed.

7. print("st[4:4] is ", st[4:4]) #gives empty string

Here, st[4:4] indicates, slicing should start from 4 th character and end with (4- 1)=3rd
character, which is not possible. Hence the output would be an empty string.

8. print(st[3:8:2]) #output is l o
Starting from 3rd character, till 7th character, every alternative index is considered.

9. print(st[1:8:3]) #output is eoo

Starting from index 1, till 7 index, every 3rd character is extracted here.
th

10. print(st[-4:-1]) #output is orl

Refer the diagram of negative indexing given earlier. Excluding the -1st character, all
characters at the indices -4, -3 and -2 will be displayed. Observe the role of stride with
default value 1 here. That is, it is computed as -4+1 =-3, -3+1=-2 etc.

11. print(st[-1:]) #output is d

Here, starting index is -1, ending index is not mentioned (means, it takes the index
10) and the stride is default value 1. So, we are trying to print characters from -1 (which is
the last character of negative indexing) till 10th character (which is also the last character in
positive indexing) in incremental order of 1. Hence, we will get only last character as output.

12. print(st[:-1]) #output is Hello Worl

Here, starting index is default value 0 and ending is -1 (corresponds to last character in
negative indexing). But, in slicing, as last index is excluded always, -1st character is omitted
and considered only up to -2nd character.

13. print(st[::]) #outputs Hello World

Here, two colons have used as if stride will be present. But, as we haven’t mentioned stride
its default value 1 is assumed. Hence this will be a full string.

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14. print(st[::-1]) #outputs dlroW olleH

This example shows the power of slicing in Python. Just with proper slicing, we could able
to reverse the string. Here, the meaning is a full string to be extracted in the order of -1.
Hence, the string is printed in the reverse order.

15. print(st[::-2]) #output is drWolH

Here, the string is printed in the reverse order in steps of -2. That is, every alternative
character in the reverse order is printed. Compare this with example (6) given above.

By the above set of examples, one can understand the power of string slicing and of Python script.
The slicing is a powerful tool of Python which makes many task simple pertaining to data types like
strings, Lists, Tuple, Dictionary etc. (Other types will be discussed in later Modules)

Strings are Immutable

The objects of string class are immutable. That is, once the strings are created (or initialized), they
cannot be modified. No character in the string can be edited/deleted/added. Instead, one can create a
new string using an existing string by imposing any modification required.

Try to attempt following assignment –

>>> st= “Hello World”
>>> st[3]='t'
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment

Here, we are trying to change the 4th character (index 3 means, 4th character as the first index is 0) to
t. The error message clearly states that an assignment of new item (a string) is not possible on string
object. So, to achieve our requirement, we can create a new string using slices of existing string as
below –

>>> st= “Hello World”

>>> st1= st[:3]+ 't' + st[4:]
>>> print(st1)
Helto World #l is replaced by t in new string st1

Looping and Counting

Using loops on strings, we can count the frequency of occurrence of a character within another
string. The following program demonstrates such a pattern on computation called as a counter.
Initially, we accept one string and one character (single letter). Our aim to find the total number of
times the character has appeared in string. A variable count is initialized to zero, and incremented
each time a character is found. The program is given below –
def countChar(st,ch): count=0
for i in st:

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if i==ch:
count+=1
return count

st=input("Enter a string:")
ch=input("Enter a character to be counted:") c=countChar(st,ch)
print("{0} appeared {1} times in {2}".format(ch,c,st))

Sample Output:
Enter a string: hello how are you?
Enter a character to be counted: h
h appeared 2 times in hello how are you?

The in Operator
The in operator of Python is a Boolean operator which takes two string operands. It returns True, if
the first operand appears in second operand, otherwise returns False. For example,

>>> 'el' in 'hello' #el is found in hello True

>>> 'x' in 'hello' #x is not found in hello False

String Comparison
Basic comparison operators like < (less than), > (greater than), == (equals) etc. can be applied on
string objects. Such comparison results in a Boolean value True or False. Internally, such
comparison happens using ASCII codes of respective characters. Consider following examples –

Ex1. st= “hello”

if st== ‘hello’:
print(‘same’)

Output is same. As the value contained in st and hello both are same, the equality results in True.

Ex2. st= “hello”

if st<= ‘Hello’:
print(‘lesser’)
else:
print(‘greater’)

Output is greater. The ASCII value of his greater than ASCII value of H. Hence, hello
is greater than Hello.

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NOTE: A programmer must know ASCII values of some of the basic characters. Here are few –
A–Z : 65 – 90
a–z : 97 – 122
0–9 : 48 – 57
Space 32
Enter Key 13

String Methods
String is basically a class in Python. When we create a string in our program, an object of that class
will be created. A class is a collection of member variables and member methods (or functions).
When we create an object of a particular class, the object can use all the members (both variables
and methods) of that class. Python provides a rich set of built-in classes for various purposes. Each
class is enriched with a useful set of utility functions and variables that can be used by a
Programmer. A programmer can create a class based on his/her requirement, which are known as
user-defined classes.

The built-in set of members of any class can be accessed using the dot operator as shown–
objName.memberMethod(arguments)

The dot operator always binds the member name with the respective object name. This is very
essential because, there is a chance that more than one class has members with same name. To avoid
that conflict, almost all Object oriented languages have been designed with this common syntax of
using dot operator. (Detailed discussion on classes and objects will be done in later Modules.)

Python provides a function (or method) dir to list all the variables and methods of a particular class
object. Observe the following statements –

>>> s="hello" #string object is created with the name s

>>> type(s) #checking type of s
<class ‘str’> #s is object of type class str
>>> dir(s) #display all methods and variables of object s

[' add ', ' class ', ' contains ', ' delattr ', ' dir ', ' doc ', ' eq ', ' format ', ' ge ', ' getattribute ',
' getitem ', ' getnewargs ', ' gt ', ' hash ', ' init ', ' init_subclass ', ' iter ', ' le ', ' len ', ' lt ',
' mod ', ' mul ', ' ne ', ' new ', ' reduce ', ' reduce_ex ', ' repr ', ' rmod ', ' rmul ', ' setattr
', ' sizeof ', ' str ', ' subclasshook ', 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith',
'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit',
'isidentifier', 'islower', 'isnumeric',

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'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust',

'lower', 'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'replace', 'rfind',
'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title',
'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']

Students need not remember the above list !!

Note that, the above set of variables and methods are common for any object of string class that we
create. Each built-in method has a predefined set of arguments and return type. To know the usage,
working and behavior of any built-in method, one can use the command help. For example, if we
would like to know what is the purpose of islower() function (refer above list to check its
existence!!), how it behaves etc, we can use the statement –

>>> help(str.islower)
Help on method_descriptor:

islower(...)
S.islower() -> bool

Return True if all cased characters in S are lowercase and

there is at least one cased character in S, False otherwise.

This is built-in help-service provided by Python. Observe the className.memberName

format while using help.

The methods are usually called using the object name. This is known as method invocation. We say
that a method is invoked using an object.

Now, we will discuss some of the important methods of string class.

 capitalize(s) : This function takes one string argument s and returns a capitalized version of that
string. That is, the first character of s is converted to upper case, and all other characters to
lowercase. Observe the examples given below –
Ex1. >>> s="hello"
>>> s1=str.capitalize(s)
>>> print(s1)
Hello #1st character is changed to uppercase

Ex2. >>> s="hello World"

>>> s1=str.capitalize(s)
>>> print(s1)
Hello world

Observe in Ex2 that the first character is converted to uppercase, and an in-between uppercase
letter W of the original string is converted to lowercase.

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 s.upper(): This function returns a copy of a string s to uppercase. As strings are immutable, the
original string s will remain same.

>>> st= “hello”

>>> st1=st.upper()
>>> print(st1)
'HELLO'
>>> print( st) #no change in original string 'hello'

 s.lower(): This method is used to convert a string s to lowercase. It returns a copy of original
string after conversion, and original string is intact.

>>> st='HELLO'
>>> st1=st.lower()
>>> print(st1) hello
>>> print(st) #no change in original string HELLO

 s.find(s1) : The find() function is used to search for a substring s1 in the string s. If found, the
index position of first occurrence of s1 in s, is returned. If s1 is not found in s, then -1 is returned.

>>> st='hello'
>>> i=st.find('l')
>>> print(i) #output is 2
>>> i=st.find('lo')
>>> print(i) #output is 3
>>> print(st.find(‘x’)) #output is -1
The find() function can take one more form with two additional arguments viz. start and end
positions for search.

>>> st="calender of Feb. cal of march"

>>> i= st.find(‘cal’)
>>> print(i) #output is 0

Here, the substring ‘cal’is found in the very first position of st, hence the result is 0.

>>> i=st.find('cal',10,20)
>>> print(i) #output is 17

Here, the substring cal is searched in the string st between 10 th and 20th position and hence the
result is 17.

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>>> i=st.find('cal',10,15)
>>> print(i) #ouput is -1

In this example, the substring 'cal' has not appeared between 10th and 15th
character of st. Hence, the result is -1.

 s.strip(): Returns a copy of string s by removing leading and trailing white spaces.

>>> st=" hello world "

>>> st1 = st.strip()
>>> print(st1)
hello world

The strip() function can be used with an argument chars, so that specified chars are removed from
beginning or ending of s as shown below –

>>> st="###Hello##"
>>> st1=st.strip('#')
>>> print(st1) #all hash symbols are removed Hello

We can give more than one character for removal as shown below –

>>> st="Hello world"

>>> st.strip("Hld") ello wor

 S.startswith(prefix, start, end): This function has 3 arguments of which start and end are
option. This function returns True if S starts with the specified prefix, False otherwise.

>>> st="hello world"

>>> st.startswith("he") #returns True

When start argument is provided, the search begins from that position and returns True or False
based on search result.
>>> st="hello world"
>>> st.startswith("w",6) #True because w is at 6th position

When both start and end arguments are given, search begins at start and ends at end.

>>> st="xyz abc pqr ab mn gh“

>>> st.startswith("pqr ab mn",8,12) #returns False
>>> st.startswith("pqr ab mn",8,18) #returns True

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The startswith() function requires case of the alphabet to match. So, when we are not sure about
the case of the argument, we can convert it to either upper case or lowercase and then use
startswith()function as below –
>>> st="Hello"
>>> st.startswith("he") #returns False
>>> st.lower().startswith("he") #returns True

 S.count(s1, start, end): The count() function takes three arguments – string, starting position
and ending position. This function returns the number of non-overlapping occurrences of
substring s1 in string S in the range of start and end.

>>> st="hello how are you? how about you?"

>>> st.count('h') #output is 3
>>> st.count(‘how’) #output is 2
>>> st.count(‘how’,3,10) #output is 1 because of range given

There are many more built-in methods for string class. Students are advised to explore more
for further study.

Parsing Strings
Sometimes, we may want to search for a substring matching certain criteria. For example, finding
domain names from email-Ids in the list of messages is a useful task in some projects. Consider a
string below and we are interested in extracting only the domain name.

“From [email protected] Wed Feb 21 09:14:16 2018”

Now, our aim is to extract only ieee.org, which is the domain name. We can think of logic as–
o Identify the position of @, because all domain names in email IDs will be after the
symbol @
o Identify a white space which appears after @ symbol, because that will be the end of
domain name.
o Extract the substring between @ and white-space.

The concept of string slicing and find() function will be useful here.Consider the code given below –

st="From [email protected] Wed Feb 21 09:14:16 2018" atpos=st.find('@')

#finds the position of @

print('Position of @ is', atpos)

spacePos=st.find(‘ ', atpos) #position of white-space after @ print('Position

of space after @ is', spacePos)

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 Python Application Programming

host=st[atpos+1:spacePos] #slicing from @ till white-space print(host)

Execute above program to get the output as ieee.org. One can apply this logic in a loop, when our
string contains series of email IDs, and we may want to extract all those mail IDs.

Format Operator
The format operator, % allows us to construct strings, replacing parts of the strings with the data
stored in variables. The first operand is the format string, which contains one or more format
sequences that specify how the second operand is formatted. The result is a string.

>>> sum=20
>>> '%d' %sum
‘20’ #string ‘20’, but not integer 20

Note that, when applied on both integer operands, the % symbol acts as a modulus operator. When
the first operand is a string, then it is a format operator. Consider few examples illustrating usage of
format operator.

Ex1. >>> "The sum value %d is originally integer"%sum 'The sum value 20
is originally integer‘

Ex2. >>> '%d %f %s'%(3,0.5,'hello')

'3 0.500000 hello‘

Ex3. >>> '%d %g %s'%(3,0.5,'hello')

'3 0.5 hello‘

Ex4. >>> '%d'% 'hello'

TypeError: %d format: a number is required, not str

Ex5. >>> '%d %d %d'%(2,5)

TypeError: not enough arguments for format string

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