Start by doing
Now that we have Spyder open, let’s start by asking the python interpreter to print some text back to us.
Copy and paste the print function and the text, in the form of a string, into your python script (the left panel in the Spyder GUI).
print("hello, world!")The words, ‘hello, world!’ will be printed in the IPython console at the bottom right of the Spyder GUI without the quote marks “” like this:
hello, world!Right now your Spyder GUI should look like this – note that I have blanked out the paths for privacy!
Why hello, world! ?
The phrase is attributed to Brian Wilson Kernighan a Canadian computer scientist and has since become a trivial first program and trouble shooting exercise that is now a tradition.
Printing data structures
To print other data structures we can use the same print() function as used in the ‘hello world’ example:
#Here is your list
im_a_list = ["a", "b", "c"]
#Print the list
print(im_a_list)Run the code above and you should see the following printed in the IPython console:
['a', 'b', 'c']Let’s print more things!
If we print out all of our data structure examples we can see Spyder doing some interesting things, namely the top right panel is now functioning as the ‘variable explorer’ which tells you some information about your variables.
The variables are colour coded by data structure type and there is some summary information about the data values eg. size and type.
You can also see your data printed out in the bottom right panel. Note that you can get the examples_python.py script to play with later from the sequence-gazing repo.
Stay tuned for more Python basics but for now I hope this is a helpful introduction to Python and Spyder, happy coding!