On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 02:52:51PM -0500, Sammy Cornet wrote:
> on my Interpreter windows, as my first attempt, I wrote "hello world"
> but it keep telling me this: SyntaxError: invalid syntax
> Can you help me please?
Yes. The first, and most important, tool in your toolbox as a programmer
is to take careful note of the error messages you are given. The second
most important tool is to ask good questions.
Asking good questions means showing exactly what you did, *precisely*,
and not leaving it up to the reader to guess. The best way is to copy
and paste the relevant lines from your interpreter window.
If you typed *literally* "hello world", complete with quotation marks,
you shouldn't have got a SyntaxError, so I'm guessing you didn't do
this:
py> "hello world"
'hello world'
But if you left out the quotation marks, you would have:
py> hello world
File "<stdin>", line 1
hello world
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Notice the almost-blank line above the SyntaxError? See the ^ caret?
That shows you where Python thinks the error is. Unfortunately the
Python parser is a bit dumb, and often doesn't detect the error until
the end of the offending text, rather than the beginning. But in this
case, it doesn't matter: the offending term is "world" (no quotation
marks) since you cannot separate what looks like two variables with just
a space.
`"hello"` inside quotation marks is a string, `hello` on its own without
quotation marks is a variable. If you leave the quotation marks out,
then Python parses your text as:
(variable hello) (variable world)
which is illegal syntax.
Have I guessed you problem correctly? If not, you'll have to show us
exactly what you did. In the meantime, here's my second guess: you tried
to *print* "hello world", and you did this:
print "hello world"
In this case, are you using Python 3? In Python 2, print is a statement,
and can be given as shown above, but that was deemed to be a mistake for
various reasons, and in Python 3 it was changed to a regular function
that requires round brackets (or parentheses for American readers):
print("hello world")
Does this help?
--
Steven
_______________________________________________
Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org
To unsubscribe or change subscription options:
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
