Text

After input(), then Python waits for the user to enter input and press Enter, or to cancel with Ctrl+D.

On macOS and Linux, this seems to use the readline shell command internally.

Help

From help(input):

Help on built-in function input in module builtins: input(prompt=None, /) Read a string from standard input. The trailing newline is stripped. The prompt string, if given, is printed to standard output without a trailing newline before reading input. If the user hits EOF (*nix: Ctrl-D, Windows: Ctrl-Z+Return), raise EOFError. On *nix systems, readline is used if available.

Examples

Example in the console:

>> answer = input() Hello, World >>> answer 'Hello, World'

Or as a script:

answer = input() print(answer)

Example with a prompt. Note the space after the prompt text.

>>> answer = input("What is your age? ") What is your age? 31 >>> answer "31" >>> int(answer) 31

Put the question and answer on different lines using \n and tell the user to enter input with > symbol.

>>> input("What is your age?\n> ") What is your age? > 31 '31'

Here is a REPL. It runs in a loop, handling user input and printing repeatedly.

print("Square tool") while True: answer = input("Enter a number:\n> ") squared = int(answer) ** 2 print(f"Squared: {squared}\n")

Running it:

$ python3 app.py Enter a number: > 2 Squared: 4 Enter a number: > 4 Squared: 16

Deprecation note

Note that previously there was both and input and raw_input. Using input would evaluate input as Python code using something like eval internally. This turned for example numeric input from a string to an integer.

Now there is just input. This is safe and will not run an evaluation as Python code.

Get password

Get the user to enter a password in the console.

The characters will be masked as invisible.

Usage

getpass.getpass() getpass.getpass(prompt=CUSTOM_PROMPT, stream=OUTPUT_STREAM)

e.g.

import getpass pword = getpass.getpass() # Password:  pword # 'my password'

In Unix, this uses this function:

>>> help(getpass.getpass) unix_getpass(prompt='Password: ', stream=None) Prompt for a password, with echo turned off. Args: prompt: Written on stream to ask for the input. Default: 'Password: ' stream: A writable file object to display the prompt. Defaults to the tty. If no tty is available defaults to sys.stderr.  ...

Examples

import getpass try: p = getpass.getpass() except Exception as error: print('ERROR', error) else: print('Password entered:', p)

Run it.

$ python3 app.py Password: **** Password entered: abcd