How are booleans formatted in Strings in Python?

Question

I see I can\'t do:

\"%b %b\" % (True, False)

in Python. I guessed %b for b(oolean). Is there something like this?

Answer 1

>>> print "%r, %r" % (True, False)
True, False

This is not specific to boolean values - %r calls the __repr__ method on the argument. %s (for str) should also work.

Answer 2

If you want True False use:

"%s %s" % (True, False)

because str(True) is 'True' and str(False) is 'False'.

or if you want 1 0 use:

"%i %i" % (True, False)

because int(True) is 1 and int(False) is 0.

Answer 3

To update this for Python-3 you can do this

"{} {}".format(True, False)

However if you want to actually format the string (e.g. add white space), you encounter Python casting the boolean into the underlying C value (i.e. an int), e.g.

>>> "{:<8} {}".format(True, False)
'1        False'

To get around this you can cast True as a string, e.g.

>>> "{:<8} {}".format(str(True), False)
'True     False'

Answer 4

You may also use the Formatter class of string

print "{0} {1}".format(True, False);
print "{0:} {1:}".format(True, False);
print "{0:d} {1:d}".format(True, False);
print "{0:f} {1:f}".format(True, False);
print "{0:e} {1:e}".format(True, False);

These are the results

True False
True False
1 0
1.000000 0.000000
1.000000e+00 0.000000e+00

Some of the %-format type specifiers (%r, %i) are not available. For details see the Format Specification Mini-Language