FALL 2021

IST1025B: INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING

Lab 2a: Python Data Types and Variables

Introduction: Data types and variables

In this tutorial we will learn how to create variables and understand different types of data. Follow
along with this tutorial by creating a new python file named PDTV and enter the code snippets
presented.

 Variable assignment
 Data types
 Characters
 Variable reassignment
 Changing data types
 Reading user input
 Summary
 Exercise 2.1
 Exercise 2.2
 Assignment 2

2.1 Variable assignment

One of the most important things to be able to do in any programming language is store information
in variables. You can think of variables as a label for one or more pieces of information. When doing
analysis in python, all of your data (the variables you measured in your study) will be stored as
variables. You can also create variables for other things too, which we will learn later on in the course.

Let's create a few simple variables to represent customer demographics:

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 Variable Value
customer id 12345
first name Wanda
last name Wonderly
gender Female
married False
annual income 240,000

We'll begin with customer id. As a rule, all variables need to be single words without spaces, otherwise
python will throw a Syntax Error. Use underscores _ instead of spaces.

Its best practice to also use lowercase letter for variable names and to use names that are meaningful.
For example, customer_id is more descriptive then ci and uses an underscore instead of a space.

Also, avoid using the following reserved python words as variables names.

Keyword
and del from None True
as elif global nonlocal try
assert else if not while
break except import or with
class False in pass yield
continue finally is raise
def for lambda return

Now that we have some basic rules down, let's create the variable customer_id. We do this by using a
special operator called the assignment operator denoted by a single equal sign, =. The name of the
variable is on the left side of the equals sign and the value being assigned is on the right.

customer_id = 12345

To see the value referenced in a variable, type in the variable name.

customer_id
12345

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2.2 Data types

You can also determine the data type of the variable. "A data type is a particular kind of data item, as
defined by the values it can take, the programming language used (in our case, python), or the
operations that can be performed on it".

a) Numeric data types: int and float

The data type for customer_id is determined by the value it is assigned. Since it is assigned 12345, the
data type is a numeric data type called an integer denoted as int, since it is a positive whole number.
If it was -12345, would it still be of type int? Yes, since integers are positive or negative whole
numbers. However, it was assigned 12345.0 python would consider it a float. A float is simply a
floating point decimal. In short, if your data has decimal points, then it is a float. If it is only whole
numbers, then it is an int.

To determine the data type of an existing variable use the type() function and pass in the variable
name.

Try it:

type(customer_id)
<class 'int'>

Let's create a variable named salary and assign it the value of 240,000.

salary=240,000 # this will cause an error.

salary
(240, 0)

What is the error? Well you'll notice that python still executed the code. A logical error type occurred.
This means that our code worked but the output was unexpected. When we check the data type as
shown below, it is of type tuple. This is a data structure we'll learn more about in tutorial 3.

type(salary)
<class 'tuple'>

What caused this mistake or logical error?

Well, that thousands separator (the comma) in 240,000. Python interpreted the assignment to salary as
two values: 240 and 000.

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To correct it, remove the thousands separator.

salary = 240000
type(salary)
<class 'int'>
salary
240000

However, this output format is undesirable for for reports and graphs. Consider using
the .format() function to make your output look more readable,

Number formatting

For example,

salary=240000
print("${:,.0f}".format(salary))
$240,000

The $ adds the dollar sign. You can add any currency symbol, e.g. £, €, ¥.

The :, adds a comma as a thousands separator, and the .0f limits the string to zero decimal places at
the end. This is followed by the .format() function that passes in the variable to format.

The following table shows various ways to format numbers using Python’s str.format() function,
including examples for both float formatting and integer formatting.

To run examples use print("FORMAT".format(NUMBER)). See the table below for the usage.

The first example, illustrates how to format data for 2 decimal places
using: print("{:.2f}".format(3.1415926))

Number Format Output Description

3.1415926 {:.2f} 3.14 2 decimal places
3.1415926 {:+.2f} +3.14 2 decimal places with sign
-1 {:-.2f} -1.00 2 decimal places with sign
2.71828 {:.0f} 3 No decimal places
5 {:0>2d} 05 Pad number with zeros (left padding, width 2)
5 {:x<4d} 5000 Pad number with x’s (right padding, width 4)
10 {:x<4d} 1000 Pad number with x’s (right padding, width 4)
1000000 {:,} 1,000,000 Number format with comma separator
0.25 {:.2%} 25.00% Format percentage
1000000000 {:.2e} 1.00e+09 Exponent notation
32 ${:.2f} $32.00 Adding a currency symbol

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Use the format code syntax {field_name:conversion}, where field_name specifies the index number
of the argument to the str.format() method, and conversion refers to the conversion code of the data
type.

b) String data types

Next, let's create the other variables from our very first example of customer demographics and
assign them to the following values:

Variable Value Status

customer id 12345 Created as customer_id
first name Wanda
last name Wonderly
gender Female
married False
annual income 240,000

Below, I've attempted to create the variable first name and assign it to Wanda. There are two
mistakes in this code. Can you find them?

first name = Wanda #will throw an error

First, the variable first name has a space in it. We know variables cannot contain spaces. Let's fix it.

firstname = Wanda #will throw an error

What's still wrong with the code above?

If you don't know, try to run it. What type of error is thrown?

You will likely receive an error message that looks like the following:

NameError: name 'Wanda' is not defined

What do you think is wrong?

Well, it probably has something to do with Wanda. When we assign values that contain letters (With
some exceptions like True and False. More on that soon!), or letters AND numbers those values need
to be enclosed in double (or single) quotation marks. When we run the code above we receive this
error:

NameError: name 'Wanda' is not defined

We can fix this code by putting Wanda in double quotes:

firstname = "Wanda"

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The type of data assigned to firstname is called a string. Strings are sequences of character data. The
string type in Python is called str.

String literals may be delimited using either single or double quotes. All the characters between the
opening delimiter and matching closing delimiter are part of the string. For example, when we used
the print() function in tutorial 1, we enclosed the text in double quotes. We could print out the
name Wanda three ways.

Way 1: Using double quotes:

print("Wanda")
Wanda

Way 2: Using single quotes:

print('Wanda')
Wanda

Way 3: Referencing the variable firstname

print(firstname)
Wanda

We can determine the variable data type of firstname and see that the type str is returned, which is a
string data type.

type(firstname)
<class 'str'>

Let's move on to creating the two other string variables: lastname and gender and print them out.
You'll notice in the code below that I've used the print() function to print out both a string literal and
the value referenced in the string variable together in a single statement. I've added the sep parameter
to the print() function as well. sep is set to sep="'" to indicate that the separator between values (our
variables gender and lastname) should be a single quote. The default for sep is a space.

lastname = "Wonderly"
gender = "Female"

print("I just created two more variables named lastname with the value of", lastname, "and
gender with the value of",gender, sep="'")

I just created two more variables named lastname with the value of 'Wonderly' and gender with the
value of'Female

The format is variablename.upper() and variablename.lower().

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Let's print out lastname and gender using these functions to change the output.

lastname.upper()
'WONDERLY'
gender.lower()
'female'

A method call is called an invocation; in this case, we would say that we are
invoking .upper on lastname and .lower on gender.

c) Boolean data types

Has lastname changed it's referenced value to uppercase WONDERLY?

You can test this by using the isupper() function as shown below.

lastname.isupper()
False

Are you surprised by the result?

You'll notice that the value of False is returned. False is a Boolean value. Boolean values can only
be True or False. The function isupper() returns a Boolean value. The value returned in this example
is False, indicating that the variable lastname is not in uppercase lettering.

This my be confusing to you. Previously, you just used the upper() function to print out the value
referenced in lastname in uppercase lettering. This is because we did not update lastname with the the
result of lastname.isupper(). We'll learn how to update variables in the section below.

For now, let's continue the discussion on Boolean data types.

In our demographic data we have a variable named married. Let's create the variable and assign it the
value of False.

married = False
type(married)
<class 'bool'>

You'll notice that the type returned for the married variable is bool, meaning a Boolean data type.
When using Boolean data types, never put double or single quotes around the
values. True and False are special reserved words in python. When used without quotes they indicate
that values are Boolean. The words TRUE, true, FALSE, and false are not Boolean values in python
and will result in a NameError.

In the upcoming tutorials we'll use Boolean variables with conditional statements and logical
operators.

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For example, we can use an if statement to see if our customer is married or not. Note that the
precise syntax of the statements below, including the colons and indentation.

if (married):
print ("This customer is married.")
else:
print ("This customer is not married.")
This customer is not married.

This statement evaluates married to see if it is True or False. Since the value is False the print
statement below the else is printed returned.

2.3 Characters

Each character that you can type on your keyboard has a numeric representation. For example the
value of "A" is 65 in ASCII. "ASCII stands for American Standard Code for Information
Interchange. Computers can only understand numbers, so an ASCII code is the numerical
representation of a character such as 'a' or '@'"((“ASCII Table and Description” 2020), para 1).

In python,"A" will be still be considered data of type string. However, knowing the numeric
equivalent for each character is important when trying to compare them to each other.

For example, given that "A" is 65 in ASCII, the value of "a" is 97. This means that "a" is greater
than "A", in computer speak. How could you prove this (and not just take my word for it)? Well, use
the max() function to see which one is greater.

Try it

max("A", "a")
## 'a'

You'll see that 'a' is returned, thus the higher ASCII value.

However, you still haven't proved the ASCII values of "A" or 'a'. Let's find the the ASCII values of
these character to prove this example out. To do this, we can use the ord() function, which is a built-
in function in Python that accepts a char (string of length 1) as argument and returns the Unicode
code point for that character. Since the first 128 Unicode code points are same as ASCII value, we
can use this function to find the ASCII value of any character.

your_first_character = "a"
your_second_character = "A"
print("The ASCII value of " + your_first_character + " is: ",ord(your_first_character))
## The ASCII value of a is: 97
print("The ASCII value of " + your_second_character + " is: ",ord(your_second_character))
## The ASCII value of A is: 65

Then you can check the data types of the returned ASCII values by
using type(ord(your_first_character)) and type(ord(your_second_character)).

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Try it

type(ord(your_first_character))
## <class 'int'>
type(ord(your_second_character))
## <class 'int'>

It's possible to return the character value from the ASCII value using the chr() function. See below:

num = (65)
print(chr(num))
## A

NB:

For the full ASCII table and character equivalents go to https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII

2.4 Variable reassignment

Updating a variable is easy. To save the result from lastname.isupper() we can simply assign
lastname to itself as shown below.

lastname = lastname.isupper()
print(lastname) #prints out the result
False

Did you know that updating a variable with a different type of data will change it's data type?

For example, the variable lastname is of type bool. We can prove it using the type() function.

type(lastname)
<class 'bool'>

If we reassign lastname to the value of 20 (without double or single quotes around the value), it
would be of type int.

lastname = 20
type(lastname)
<class 'int'>

Let's go back and reassign lastname the correct value.

lastname = "Wonderly"
type(lastname)
<class 'str'>

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2.5 Changing data types

If you wanted salary to be of type float you could simply reassign salary the value of 240000.00
or cast the variable to a different type. Casting is the process of converting a value to different data
type.

Option 1: reassign and use the .format function.

salary = 240000.00
type(salary)
<class 'float'>
print("${:,.2f}".format(salary))
$240,000.00

Option 2: cast the variable to type float using the float() function and use the .format function.

salary = 240000
salary = float(salary)
type(salary)
<class 'float'>
print("${:,.2f}".format(salary))
$240,000.00

You can change from one data type to another using the following functions:

Function Description Example Input Example Output

Converts an argument to an integer
int() int("5") 5
value from a number or a string
Converts an argument to a floating
float() point decimal value from a number or a float(5) 5.0
string
str() Converts an argument to a string value str(5) '5'
Converts an argument to a Boolean
bool() bool(0) False
value

While there are functions to change data from one type to another, the value must be able to be
converted to the right type.

For example, it's easy to convert x = "23" to x = 23 by using x = int(x). However, you couldn't
necessarily convert name = "Kelly" to an integer using int(name). This is simply because the
name Kelly cannot be converted to a number.

Here's a good reference to learn more about data types: https://realpython.com/python-data-

types/ (Sturtz 2019).

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2.6 Reading user input

Up until now, you've been writing a few lines of code to solve a specific problem. These short
programs did not require any input from a user. Rather, you were both the the coder and user of the
programs you've written thus far (in this course).

We'll go through an example that asks user of our program for input, such as their name and how many
hours they exercise per week.

Then, we can present our user with a result that calcuates the number of hours they work out per year;
this is all personalized based on their input!

Let's try it using the input function to read in the user input.

input("Enter your name and press the enter key.")

This will literally prompt the user to enter their name. Try it.

Did you try it out? What happened? Well, it's probably a bit underwhelming. The input you typed in
as the user was just printed back to the screen.

Let's modify our code and store the result of the user's response in a variable.

username = input("Enter your name and press the enter key.\n")

Now, the name entered by the user is can be easily referenced in the variable, username. Also, did
you notice the \n that I included after my prompt? This prints the input string to the screen with a
line break following the prompt. The box for user input then appears on a newline. The \n is the
syntax for a newline.

Try it.

Use the newline character when you print strings to the screen and you want to include line breaks.

Next, let us ask the user our second question:

How many hours do you exercise per week?

How would you do this? Well, the same way we did with the first question, using the input function
and assigning the value entered by the user to a variable.

workout_hours = input("How many hours on average do you exercise per week.\n")

Our next task is to print out a nice statement to the user that calcuates the number of hours they
exercise per year.

print("Hi", username,". You've have spent", (workout_hours)*52, "working out this year.")

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Try it.

What was the result? Was the output expected?

This is an example of another logical error. Our code worked, but the output was produced an
unexpected result. Any idea why?

The answer is very simple, but one that may not be obvious. The input function captures data of type
string, regardless of the user's input.

This is a perfect example of where we need to convert from one data type to another. We need to
convert our variable workout_hours to a float. Why a float and not an int? Well, it's possible our user
exercise average is 5.5 hours per week, which is a non-integer value. If we try to convert a string to
an integer we'd get an error. Try it yourself.

hours = 5.5 print(int(hours))

Did you see the error?

Here is the final solution:

print("Hi", username,". You've have spent", float(workout_hours)*52, "working out this year.")

When we plan and write programs for others we have to account for all types of input.

What other types of user input would want to plan for? As we continue on in the course we will do
more "error handling" to account for human, rather than computer input, that can take many
unexpected forms.

2.7 Advanced: Finding variable names

There may be times where you actually want to know the name of the variable you are using in on of
your python programs.

There a python library called varname and a method called nameof() that we can use to
programmatically identify the name of a given variable.

Here's an example you can try:

pip install python-varname #first install library

from varname import varname, nameof #import library and method

a=1 # create a variable

aname=nameof(a) #store the name of the variable in another variable
print(aname) #print variable a's name to the screen

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2.8 Summary

 The equal sign = denotes assignment in python.

 We use the assignment operator to assign values to a variable.
 Variables must be named as a single word without spaces.
 Variable names should be descriptive and written in lowercase.
 The value referenced in a variable can be accessed by typing out the variable name in a code
chunk. The value will be returned.
 Variables that reference values that are non-numeric (with some exceptions) must be
assigned values that are enclosed in double or single quotes and will be of type str.
 The output of numbers can be formatted using the format() function.
 a bool data type is Boolean or logical data with the value of True or False.
 Variables can be reassigned new values. Variable reassignment from one data type such
an int value to a str value will change the data type of the reassigned variable.
 Casting converts a variable from one data type to another. The value must be compatible and
convert-able to the target data type.
 Functions to cast to different data types include int(), float(), str(), and bool().
 The input function allows us to prompt the user for input. The input can be referenced in a
variable.
 The input captured from the input function is always of type str.

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Exercises:

Instructions

 For exercises and assignment ensure you record your output in one pdf document
 Submit your work at the end of the lesson to link provided for in week 4 in blackboard
 Adhere to deadlines

Exercise 2.1

What type of value (integer, floating point number, or character string) would you use to represent
each of the following? Try to come up with more than one good answer for each problem. For example,
in # 1, when would counting days with a floating point variable make more sense than using an integer?

1. Number of days since the start of the year.

2. Time elapsed from the start of the year until now in days.
3. Serial number of a piece of lab equipment.
4. A lab specimen’s age
5. Current population of a city.
6. Average population of a city over time.

Exercise 2.2

1. Building upon exercise 1.2, create variable buy and variable sell for Jen and assign it the
appropriate values as shown below. Be sure to name your variables descriptive names, in
lowercase lettering, and without spaces.
2. Restructure your percent return formula using your new variables and assign this to its
own tot_return variable. Print out the variables and format to 2 decimal places.
3. What data type is returned by the output (answer) from question 2? Use the appropriate
function to display the data type.
4. Provide the output for the following expressions and explain why.

a) max("adbED")
b) max(4234234,234234)
c) max(1,000)
d) min("}34#&")

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Exercise 2.3

1. You are working for Facebook’s Operations Intelligence team and are tasked to build a
calculator to find the best ad sales representative each month which is based on the largest
(hint: max) monthly ad revenue. There are 5 sales representatives listed below with this
month’s revenue. Set up the formula so each month you simply change each representative’s
revenue. Call the calculator rep_calculator

 Joe: $1,500,000
 Sarah: $2,750,000
 Jack: $560,000
 Mark: $1,975,000
 Shawn: $2,200,000

2. Print out the following statement using your calculated value. Be sure to format the data
using .format.

This month’s Best Ad Sales Representative made: ____________ dollars!

3. Thinking question: How might you find out the name of the Ad Sales Representative who
earned the most (answer in words, not code)?

Exercise 2.4

1. Write a python program to swap two numbers using a third variable

2. Write a python program to swap two numbers without using third variable
3. Write a python program to read two numbers and find the sum of their cubes
4. Write a python program to read three numbers and if any two variables are equal , print that
number
5. Write a python program to read three numbers and find the smallest among them
6. Write a python program to read three numbers and print them in ascending order (without
using sort function)
7. Write a python program to read radius of a circle and print the area

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Assignment 2a

1. You work in baseball operations at the NY Mets and are purchasing baseball caps from
NewEra for next season. NewEra sells two types of caps, a snapback and a flex cap. The price
points for each hat are listed below. Based on forecasted demand for next season you plan to
buy 40,000 snapbacks and 70,000 flex hats.

 Flex=$12.45
 Snapback=$10.60

Create variables for: snap_num (the number of snap caps), flex_num (the number of flex caps), along
with the corresponding prices: snap_px, flex_px.

2. Create a total_cost variable that represents the total cost of your purchase of both hat types.
Print out the value to the screen.
3. After running some analysis you realize that snapbacks are even less popular this year and you
decide to reduce the number of snapbacks by 10,000 and increase the flex hats by 10,000.
Adjust your variables for this change and calculate a new total cost. Print out the value to the
screen in the following sentence: The total cost is $1,314,000.00. Where the resulting total
cost is a variable that is computed and printed.

-The End-

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