Input #

The input() function will pose a prompt to the user, in which the answer to the question will be returned to the program

Remember that all responses will be stored in a string even if they are numbers, so use casting!

For example, if I wanted to make a greeting with the user’s name, I would need them to input their name into my code for me to use it

name = input('Hello user, what is your name?')

This first prints out the statement, Hello user, what is your name? to the console, and then waits for the user input. After getting the user input, it then goes off and stores it into the variable, named name

To print out a greeting to the user, we would do

print('Hello' + name)

Now, if we actually used this, it would go like this

Hello user, what is your name? Sleepy
Hello Sleepy

Great! But what if we wanted to make a mini-calculator and add two numbers together?

Well, if we did it like it was defined above, we would do

num1 = input('Please enter your first number')
num2 = input('Please enter your second number')
print(num1+num2)

Cool, now let us run this

Please enter your first number 5
Please enter your second number 10
510

Well, it looks like we are doing some basic caveman math here. Well, why did it only combine the two inputs and not actually ‘add’ them?

The input() function takes in an input and keeps it is a string. Wait, a string, but don’t we want to add two numbers together? This is where casting comes in

We will cast the two inputs we get into integers, and then add them

num1 = int(input('Please enter your first number'))
num2 = int(input('Please enter your second number'))
print(num1+num2)

Now let us run this

Please enter your first number 5
Please enter your second number 10
15

Nice, now it works