2.8. Input¶

Programs are more useful if the user can change the behavior of the program by giving the program input. In Python there is a built-in function to accomplish this task. As you might expect, it is called input.

name: str
print("Please enter your name")
name = input()

The user of the program can enter the name and press return. When this happens the text that has been entered is returned from the input function, and in this case assigned to the variable name. Make sure you run this example a number of times and try some different names in the input box that appears.

It is very important to note that the input function returns a string value. Even if you asked the user to enter their age, you would get back a string like "17". It would be your job, as the programmer, to convert that string into an int or a float, using the int or float converter functions we saw earlier.

To modify our previous program, we will add an input statement to allow the user to enter the number of seconds. Then we will convert that string to an integer. From there the process is the same as before. To complete the example, we will print some appropriate output.

The variable str_seconds will refer to the string that is entered by the user. As we said above, even though this string may be 7684, it is still a string and not a number. To convert it to an integer, we use the int function. The result is referred to by total_secs. Now, each time you run the program, you can enter a new value for the number of seconds to be converted.

Check your understanding

seconds = input()
hours = int(seconds) // 3600
total_secs = int(seconds)
secs_still_remaining = total_secs % 3600

seconds = input()
hours = int(seconds) // 3600
total_secs = int(seconds)
secs_still_remaining = total_secs % 3600