What is usage of the last comma in this code?
It stops print
from printing a newline at the end of the text.
As Dave pointed out, the documentation in python 2.x says: …. "A '\n' character is written at the end, unless the print statement ends with a comma."
UPDATE:
The documentation of python 3.x states that print()
is a function that accepts the keyword argument end
which defaults to a newline, \n
.
A comma at the end of a print statement prevents a newline character from being appended to the string. (See http://docs.python.org/reference/simple_stmts.html#the-print-statement)
In your tweaked code:
for x in range(1, 11):
print repr(x).rjust(2), repr(x*x).rjust(3),
# Note trailing comma on previous line
repr(x*x*x).rjust(4)
the last line simply becomes an unused expression because Python statements are generally separated by line breaks. If you added a backslash (\) -- the Python line continuation character -- to the end of the line of the print statement and removed the comment, then the repr(x*x*x).rjust(4)
would be appended to the print statement.
To be more explicit:
print repr(x).rjust(2), repr(x*x).rjust(3), repr(x*x*x).rjust(4)
and
print repr(x).rjust(2), repr(x*x).rjust(3), \
repr(x*x*x).rjust(4)
are equivalent, but
print repr(x).rjust(2), repr(x*x).rjust(3),
repr(x*x*x).rjust(4)
is not. This oddness of the print statement is one of the things they fixed in Python 3, by making it a function. (See http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html#print-is-a-function)