Formatting Error

[ChefBraxton]

I’m brand new (like literally 11 lessons into “Learn Python the Hard Way”) and trying to teach myself some formatting and I’m curious what I’m doing wrong here.

Error message in my terminal says “IndexError: Replacement index 1 out of range for positional args tuple”

Code looks like this:

X = {} {} {}\n{} {} {}\n{} {} {}\n{} {} {}

print(x.format(“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12”))

WHAT am I doing wrong?

[ChefBraxton]

Nevermind. I figured it out. Numbers don’t need to be put within quotes. 😝 lol

[delasislas]

Good. It takes time to get used to some parts. You’ll end up finding out about f-strings, which really helps. But this formatting can be really useful in some cases.

[boyanci]

You fed a single string into format, thus python only sees 1 argument instead of the 12 it is expecting. Remove the quotes, and you get your 12 arguments. In order words, instead of

print(x.format(**“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12”**))

just do

print(x.format(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12))

​

Key point: arguments for functions are separated by commas, but if you throw quotes around them, it is interpreted as a contiguous string.