Python Forum

Simple question... embarrassed I am struggling with this.

I am printing a string variable but it shows a leading and trailing space. Here is a.piece of code:

a="mystring"
print("[",a,"]")

output of this shows: mystring "
" mystring "

why are there spaces before and after?

The output I get after running your code is:

Output:
[ mystring ]

It is because print function's default separator is a whitespace. If you want to change the separator, you can specify it explicitly:

print("[",a,"]", sep='')

An alternative you can use, which is also more generic, is to format the string (with format method):

print("[{}]".format(a))

Thank you. That makes sense.