raw_input function in Python

Janezcka picture Janezcka · Apr 6, 2011 · Viewed 610.5k times · Source

What is the raw_input function? Is it a user interface? When do we use it?

Answer

Andrea Spadaccini picture Andrea Spadaccini · Apr 6, 2011

It presents a prompt to the user (the optional arg of raw_input([arg])), gets input from the user and returns the data input by the user in a string. See the docs for raw_input().

Example:

name = raw_input("What is your name? ")
print "Hello, %s." % name

This differs from input() in that the latter tries to interpret the input given by the user; it is usually best to avoid input() and to stick with raw_input() and custom parsing/conversion code.

Note: This is for Python 2.x