I am very new to programming and I'm starting out with Python. I tried to look up my question here but didn't really find anything.
I'm trying to work a very simple print command but I'm getting an error for some reason that I don't understand.
last = 'smith'
middle = 'paul'
first = 'john'
print(first.capitalize(), middle.capitalize(), last.capitalize(), sep='\t')
According to the answer in the book, this should be right, but every time I try to run it, I get an error with the 'sep':
print(first.capitalize(), middle.capitalize(), last.capitalize(), sep='\t')
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong. for what it's worth I'm using PyScripter.
[EDIT]
Thanks for that. I found out that I'm using Python 2.7.3 instead of 3.3. So I looked up the manual to see how the separator works. It seems to me that the only difference is with the square bracket. The manual describes the print function as :
print([object, ...][, sep=' '][, end='\n'][, file=sys.stdout])
So I changed my print command and added the square bracket:
print ([first.capitalize(),middle.capitalize(),last.capitalize()] [, sep='\t'])
but unfortunately this doesn't work either as I get an error that highlights the square brackets around sep='\t'. Even when I take the brackets out, the error doesn't go away.
I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, it seems like it should be very simple.
You aren't actually using Python 3, you just think you are. Try:
import sys
print(sys.version)
and see what comes out. The Python 2 print ... statement (not print(...) function in Python 3) interprets this as
print (first.capitalize(), middle.capitalize(), last.capitalize(), sep='\t')
which is trying to print a tuple with a keyword argument, thus the syntax error on sep