Python 2.7: %d, %s, and float()

Question

I am attempting to teach myself a little coding through the "learn python the hard way" book and am struggling with %d / %s / %r when tying to display a floating point number. How do you properly pass a floating point number with a format character? First I tried %d but that made my answers display as integers.... I had some success with %r, but I was under the assumption that was usually reserved for debugging? I figured out for division in python 2.x you have to manually float the denominator for it to properly work for some reason.

Example code:

def divide (a, b):
    print "WE DIVIDING %r and %r NOW" % (a, b)
    return a / float(b)
print "Input first number:"
first = float(raw_input(">  "))
print "OK, now input second number:"
second = float(raw_input(">  "))

ans = divide(first, second)
print "DONE: %r DIVIDED BY %r EQUALS %r, SWEET MATH BRO!" % (first, second, ans)

Answer 1

See String Formatting Operations:

%d is the format code for an integer. %f is the format code for a float.

%s prints the str() of an object (What you see when you print(object)).

%r prints the repr() of an object (What you see when you print(repr(object)).

For a float %s, %r and %f all display the same value, but that isn't the case for all objects. The other fields of a format specifier work differently as well:

>>> print('%10.2s' % 1.123) # print as string, truncate to 2 characters in a 10-place field.
        1.
>>> print('%10.2f' % 1.123) # print as float, round to 2 decimal places in a 10-place field.
      1.12

Answer 2

Try the following:

print "First is: %f" % (first)
print "Second is: %f" % (second)

I am unsure what answer is. But apart from that, this will be:

print "DONE: %f DIVIDED BY %f EQUALS %f, SWEET MATH BRO!" % (first, second, ans)

There's a lot of text on Format String Specifiers. You can google it and get a list of specifiers. One thing I forgot to note:

If you try this:

print "First is: %s" % (first)

It converts the float value in first to a string. So that would work as well.