In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Judi Keplar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I am currently taking a course to learn Python and was looking for >some help. I need to write a Python statement to print a comma- >separated repetition of the word, "Spam", written 511 times ("Spam, >Spam, =85 Spam"). > >Can anybody help me get started? I am completely new to programming!
Well, I'll point you in a couple of good directions. The first direction would be to approach this as a traditional procedural programming problem. You need some kind of loop that can exectute a print statement 511 times. In Python, that looks something like: for i in range(511): print "spam" Almost immediately, the question that comes to mind is where, exactly, does the loop start and stop? For example, you might expect that for i in range(5): print i would print the numbers 1 through 5, but it really prints 0 through 4. This kind of "off by one" thing is a very common common issue in writing loops in almost any programming language. It's a common enough issue that a whole class of bugs is named after it, known as "fencepost errors". So, left as an exercise for the reader (i.e. you), is to figure out if "for i in range(511)" really does the loop 511 times, or maybe 510 or 512? Next, you'll notice that the first loop I wrote prints one "spam" on each line. The way you described the problem, you want all the spams on one big long line, with commas between each one. The way you get Python to not advance to the next line is to end the print statement with a comma, like this: for i in range(511): print "spam", Notice that there's something tricky going on here; the comma doesn't get printed, it's just a way of telling the print statement, "don't go on to the next line". To really get it to print a comma, you need something like: for i in range(511): print "spam,", The first comma is inside the quoted string, so it gets printed. The second one is the one that says "don't go to the next line". You're still not quite done, but I've given you enough hints. Go play with that, see what you get, and see if you can figure out what problems you still need to fix. I said I'd point you in a couple of good directions, and the second one is to look up how the "join()" string method works. It's really cool, and solves your problem in a different way. But, first I think you should master the straight-forward way. Lastly, the really cool Pythonic way would be to get a bunch of Vikings into a restaurant and give them all breakfast menus. The only problem there is you'd have trouble handing all those Vikings in with your assignment. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list