basic-python.txt
changeset 128 fa5c77536e4e
parent 127 76fd286276f7
child 129 dcb9b50761eb
child 146 b92b4e7ecd7b
--- a/basic-python.txt	Mon Sep 13 18:35:56 2010 +0530
+++ /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
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-*Script
-
-
-*Hello and welcome to this tutorial on Basic Python using Python.
-
-This tutorial formally introduces Python as a language . Through this tutorial we will be able to understand Basic Data types like number , Boolean and strings .Some basic operators , simple input/output and basic conditional flow . 
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-In numbers Python supports three kinds of data types ,
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-floats,integers and complex numbers
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-An integer can be defined as follows :
-a=13
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-This make a an integer variable with value 13 .
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-You can also type 9 around 20 times 
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-a=99999999999999999999999 . as you can see Python does not have a limit on how long an integer has to be . Isn't that great . 
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-Now will try a float.
-
-let's type 
-p=3.141592  if you type out p now you will notice that it is not absolutely equal to p you typed in . The reason for that is how a computer saves decimal values . 
-
-Apart from integer and float, Python has an in-built support for complex numbers. Now we try to assign a complex value to a variable .
-Type:
-c = 3+4j
-As you can see ,the notation for complex numbers is similar to the one used in electric engineering. 
-We will now try some operations on complex numbers . First we will try to get the absolute value of the complex number . For this we will use the abs built in function . For this do :
-abs in parenthesis c . 
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-Do get the imaginary part of c you can do :
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-c.imag
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-and similarly for real part do :
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-c.real
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-Python also has Boolean as a built-in type .
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-Try it out just type ..
- t=True , note that T in true is capitalized .    
-  
-You can apply different Boolean operations on t now for example :
-
-
-f=not t , this saves the value of not t that is False in f. 
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-We can apply other operators like or and and ,
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-f or t gives us the value True while 
-f and t gives us the value false.
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-You can use parenthesis for precedence , 
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-Lets write some piece of code to check this out .
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-a=False
-b=True
-c=True
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-To check how precedence changes with parenthesis . We will try two expressions and their evaluation.
-
-do
-(a and b) or c 
- 
-This expression gives the value True
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-where as the expression a and (b or c) gives the value False .
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-Now we will have a look at strings 
-
-type 
-w="hello"
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-w is now a string variable with the value "hello"
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-printing out w[0] + w[2] + w[-1] gives hlo if you notice the expression for accessing characters of a string is similar to lists . 
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-Also functions like len work with strings just like the way they did with lists
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-Now lets try changing a character in the string in the same way we change lists .
-
-type :
-w[0]='H'  
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-oops this gives us a Type Error . Why? Because string are immutable . You can change a string simply by assigning a new element to it . This and some other features specific to string processing make string a different kind of data structure than lists .  
- 
-Now lets see some of the ways in which you can modify strings and other methods related to strings .
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-Type :
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-a = 'Hello world' 
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-To check if a particular string starts with a particular substring you can check that with startswith method
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-a.startswith('Hell')
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-Depending on whether the string starts with that substring the function returns true or false
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-same is the case a.endwith('ld')
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-a.upper()
- returns another string that is all the letters of given string capitalized
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-similarly a.lower returns all small letters .
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-Earlier we showed you how to see documentations of functions . You can see the documentation of the lower function by doing a.lower?
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-You can use a.join to joing a list of strings to one string using a given string as connector . 
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-for example 
-
-type :
-', '.join(['a','b','c'])
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-In this case strings are joined over , and space
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-Python supports formatting values into strings. Although this can include very complicated expressions, the most basic usage is to insert values into a string with the %s placeholder. %d can be used for formatting things like integers and %f for floats
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-
-Their are many other string formatting options you can look at http://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html for more information on other options available for string formatting.
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-
-Operators ---- Probably can be a different chapter .
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-We will start the discussion on operators first with arithmetic operators .
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-% can be used for remainder for example
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-864675 % 10 gives remainder 5 
-
-
-you can use 2 *'s for power operation 
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-for example 4 ** 3 gives the result 64
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-One thing one should notice is the type of result depends on the types of input for example :
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-17 / 2 both the values being integer gives the integer result 2
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-however the result when one or two of the operators are float is float for example:
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-17/2.0 
-8.5
-17.0/2.0 
-8.5