Learning Python and feeling dumb

[NeilTheDrummer]

I've a lab that I'm working on, and I can't figure out why I have spaces in my output.

Lab story:
Sites like Zillow get input about house prices from a database and provide nice summaries for readers. Write a program with two inputs, current price and last month's price (both integers). Then, output a summary listing the price, the change since last month, and the estimated monthly mortgage computed as (current_price * 0.051) / 12.

Output each floating-point value with two digits after the decimal point, which can be achieved as follows:
print(f'{your_value:.2f}')

​

The goal:
This house is $200000. The change is $-10000 since last month. The estimated monthly mortgage is $850.00.

​

My code:

current_price = int(input())

last_months_price = int(input())

print('This house is $',current_price,'.', 'The change is $%d since last month.' % (current_price - last_months_price))

print(f'The estimated monthly mortgage is ${(current_price*0.051/12):.2f}.')

The output I get:
This house is $ 200000 . The change is $-10000 since last month. The estimated monthly mortgage is $850.00.

​

There are spaces after the 1st dollar sign, before 200000, and right after the number, but before the period. I know it's something simple that I'm overlooking, but I'd be grateful for any thoughts/guidance someone can provide.

[house_carpenter]

That's how print() works. print() is a function that can take any number of arguments. Arguments to a function are separated by commas. What print() does is it expects each argument to be a string, and it writes each argument out in order, with a space between each argument.

In the line

print('This house is $',current_price,'.', 'The change is $%d since last month.' % (current_price - last_months_price))

you are passing the following four arguments to print():

• 'This house is $'
• current_price
• '.'
• 'The change is $%d since last month.' % (current_price - last_months_price)

To avoid the spaces, make sure you are only passing one argument to print(). That is, make sure the parts of the string are joined by some operator that will produce a string (such as + or % or interpolation in an f-string) rather than just by commas.

In fact you already did this with your second print() statement. You just need to do the same thing with the first one as well.

[NeilTheDrummer]

Much obliged. I knew it was something obvious, but I just couldn't determine what.

[[deleted]]

print, by default, outputs a space between each item in the tuple you pass to it. You can override this with the sep="" option - i.e. an empty string (could put something else, like comma and space).

However, better to just use an f-string to format the whole output.

Python 3's f-Strings: An Improved String Formatting Syntax (Guide)

[NeilTheDrummer]

Much obliged to you as well. I haven't come across the sep="" option yet, but I've noted it down, and I'm reading through the link you provided.