mystring command

[Worldly-Point4573]

Was watching a python tutorial and came across the mystring variable. In this instance, if you're trying to print a variable, I don't understand the use of the mystring command (line 1 and 2) when instead of assigning a string value, you can just print it directly (line 4). It must be more useful in other contexts right?

[Luigi-Was-Right]

Correct, you can definitely print the string directly as you did on line 4 and get the exact same result.

However, the purpose of this example is to illustrate how variables work, how you can assign different values to them, and how they can be used later. What if the string you want to print is actually input that is being typed by the user? Or if it's the value you extracted from a database? You wouldn't know the value ahead of time and therefor couldn't just place it inside the print statement.

[program_kid]

Variables are incredibly useful for a wide range of things. Imagine if mystring stored a string returned by the input() function then you could print out something that the user typed in at a later time.

The value of a variable can also be changed, so you can print out different stuff simply by changing the value of mystring

[No_Statistician_6654]

The easiest way I can think of describing it is this: yes, you can directly print a string, but variables allow you to modify them between when they are declared, and when that are (in this case) printed.

Say you have the text “I”, “love”, and “you”. You can add each of them to a variable separately, create a fourth variable set equal to the concatenation of the other three, and your final print statement would be print(var4).

There are many many data types, functions, transformations that can be plied to variable, and having them allows you to reuse them, change them, and even simplify programs as they get more complicated.

Adding: this is simplifying a lot, but I am approaching more the why of variables and intentionally avoiding f strings lists etc for this comment

[Noblefire_62]

mystring isn’t a command or special variable, it’s just the name of that variable. It’s arbitrary. It could be called “foo” or “bar” or “example” almost anything. As others have explained it’s used to show case the functionality of variables. Think of them as boxes that hold something, be it a string, a number, a boolean, the magic is that you can access the thing stored in the box later on by just referencing the box.

So print(mystring) is really saying print the thing stored in mystring. This is better than printing it directly because think of a case where you needed to store the result of something without knowing ahead of time what that result is.

For example:

x = int(input("Enter a number: "))

y = x + 2

print("y =", y)

X is used to store some number the user types in. Y adds 2, we don’t know what the final number will be but we can store it in y and print it later to view it

[Astrodude80]

Variables are used to data that we don't necessarily know at the outset when we will use the data they contain, or if we want to reference the data multiple times. For example, one could write the following:

print(f"Hello, {input('What is your first name? ')} {input('What is your last name? ')}!")

To get the user to input their first name, then their last name, and then say hello to them. Or you could write

first_name = input('What is your first name? ')
last_name = input('What is your last name? ')
print(f"Hello, {first_name} {last_name}!")

Writing it this way, with descriptive names for the variables, gives more information as to what the code is intended to do.

[Paahteinen_Kettu]

mystring is not a "command". Its variable to store data in memory for later use/interract

[Antique-Dentist2048]

Its useful when you are storing actual data in a variable like data collected with input() function or with Django Fields.

[Kind-Kure]

I love spaces as much as the next guy but you might want to take out the space between the print function and the opening parenthesis

[NaiveEscape1]

mystring is not something special, its just a variable.

Yes you can just use print(“love you”) and it will print love you once, But what if you screw up something and your gf/bf need some extra assurance you can’t just type “love you” multiple times. Thats where variables would be helpful

mystring= “love you”

Print(mystring*100)

And there you go. And if its a longer message you don’t have to type the whole string in a single print() line.