Sep and end arguments of print

You already know that, to print out objects, you can use the print() function. For example, the following lines of code will show us the value of a variable:

number = 5
print(number)  # 5

But did you know that print() can take multiple keyword arguments?

The separator

For example, with the sep argument you can specify the separator between objects to be printed (the separator itself must be a string).

print('Chip', 'Dale', sep='&')  # Chip&Dale
print('Chip', 'Dale', sep=0)    # TypeError: sep must be None or a string, not int

The default value of this argument is space, that is, writing print('Gadget', 'Hackwrench', sep=' ') gives the same output as writing print('Gadget', 'Hackwrench'):

print('Gadget', 'Hackwrench', sep=' ')
# Gadget Hackwrench

print('Gadget', 'Hackwrench')
# Gadget Hackwrench

You can also use an empty string as sep when you want to print several objects together:

print(13, 'th', sep='')  # 13th

It will work even if you combine different values, such as integers and strings, in the example above.

The end

The argument end determines how the string we want to print should end. The default value is '\n', which means that it ends with a newline. So if you give no arguments to the function and simply write print(), it will shift you to a new line:

print('Monterey')
print()
print('Jack')

The output will be as follows:

Monterey

Jack

However, just as with the 'sep' argument, we can set this argument to end with any other string.

print('Tick-Tock', end=' the ')
print('Crocodil', end='e')
# Tick-Tock the Crocodile

Unpacking objects

The first arguments of the print() function are objects we want to print. For example, if it's a list characters = ['Humphrey the Bear', 'Spike the Bee', 'Fat Cat'], writing print(characters) will yield the output ['Humphrey the Bear', 'Spike the Bee', 'Fat Cat']. But what if we want to print objects from a list, not the list as a whole? In Python, there's a convenient and neat way to do so. Writing an asterisk * before a list means that its elements will be unpacked and passed to the function one after another:

print(*characters)

An important detail to understand is that the elements will be separated by spaces. This is so because the snippet of code could be replaced by the line print('Humphrey the Bear', 'Spike the Bee', 'Fat Cat') with the default sep=' ':

print(*characters)
# Humphrey the Bear Spike the Bee Fat Cat

Summary

We rediscovered the built-in print() function and examined some of its arguments, sep and end.

As you can see, arguments of the print() function provide useful ways of managing output. Keep that in mind when working with strings!