Syntax Error

[bsullivan1983]

Hey all. Just started Fundamentals of Programming 1 at my local community college. I'm on my first homework assignment which is as follows:

Land Calculation.
One acre of land is equivalent to 43,560 square feet. Write a program that asks the user to enter the total square feet in a tract of land and calculates the number of acres in the tract. (Hint: Divide the amount entered by 43,560 to get the number of acres.

I'm getting a syntax error on my variable landSize. No matter what I change the name to it says there's a syntax error. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

# Brian Sullivan
# Program - Complete
# This program will calculate the number of acres in a tract of
# land after the user inputs the total square feet of their tract.

# Sets the variable equal to the amount of square feet in one acre.
oneAcre = 43560

# This gets the number of square feet in the user's tract of land.
squareFeet = int(input( "How many square feet is your tract of land? ")

# This calculates the land size in acres.
landSize = squareFeet / oneAcre

# Displays the result to the user.
print( "Number of acres: " + format(landSize, ".2f") )

[wavic]

Put your code in python code tags.

You have missed a close bracket in the input() line.

[bsullivan1983]

Put your code in python code tags.

You have missed a close bracket in the input() line.

I apologize for not posting correctly. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. I swapped to my other laptop and re-wrote the program from scratch and it worked fine. I found out that it was, in fact, the 2nd close bracket on the input line. I have a question, although it might be too advanced for my current subject material. When I run the program, I'm only allowed to input numbers without commas, such as 90000. 90,000 gives a syntax error. How would I go about fixing that?

[Larz60+]

How would I go about fixing that?

replace the comma's as follows:

snum = input()
num = int(snum.replace(',', ''))

[bsullivan1983]

How would I go about fixing that?

replace the comma's as follows:

snum = input()
num = int(snum.replace(',', ''))

I appreciate it. Not part of the first couple chapters we've studied so I probably shouldn't add it into the program.

[wavic]

If you are using Python 3.6 you can type _ instead of commas. There is no need of str.replace() then

[sparkz_alot]

Seems like a bit of an obscure solution, as I don't know anyone who would write out ten thousand as 10_000  

Remember that an integer is a whole number, so if your user enters '10000.5' you will also receive a ValueError. To avoid this, you could use float(input()) rather than int(input()) , this will allow you to accept both whole numbers and decimal numbers.

As to the comma, you will no doubt be taught how to handle errors using 'try/except' clauses in future lessons.

One final thing, this

print( "Number of acres: " + format(landSize, ".2f") )

would be better written as:

print("Number of acres: {:.2f}".format(landSize))

[bsullivan1983]

Seems like a bit of an obscure solution, as I don't know anyone who would write out ten thousand as 10_000  

Remember that an integer is a whole number, so if your user enters '10000.5' you will also receive a ValueError. To avoid this, you could use float(input()) rather than int(input()) , this will allow you to accept both whole numbers and decimal numbers.

As to the comma, you will no doubt be taught how to handle errors using 'try/except' clauses in future lessons.

One final thing, this

print( "Number of acres: " + format(landSize, ".2f") )

would be better written as:

print("Number of acres: {:.2f}".format(landSize))

Thank you for the suggestion! I don't remember { being discussed, but if it was and I overlooked it I'll consider the change. This is our first out of 3 programs due this week. I don't want to be adding things that aren't in the current covered material so that I'm not accused of plagiarism or anything.

---

I took both suggestions into consideration and made the changes. Float() does allow the user to input a decimal number, but the output doesn't change. For example, if I input "43560" I get "1" as expected. If I enter 43560.5, the output is still "1." Now, if I enter a whole number that is not exactly one acre, say "90000," I get 2.07. What's the reasoning behind this?

[wavic]

No one will blame you if you want to learn. You don't have to wait for some lessons in school to teach you programming.

I didn't know that format() could work out of the str class :)

[nilamo]

You could also try parsing each individual character, and ignore non-numbers.

>>> x = '4234,093.23'
>>> def try_int(ch):
...   try:
...     _ = int(ch)
...     return True
...   except ValueError:
...     pass
...   return False
...
>>> ''.join(filter(try_int, x))
'423409323'
>>> # the decimal is included, so instead, we should split that out ahead of time...
...
>>> left, *_ = x.split(".")
>>> left
'4234,093'
>>> ''.join(filter(try_int, left))
'4234093'

Using filter() would probably be a pretty good hint that you got outside assistance, though :p