From 6016dbeccaadb94eb7535230f29fa4b4e2579897 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Fred Drake <fdrake@acm.org>
Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 19:20:43 +0000
Subject: Talk about str() in the discussion of string representations of
values, and give examples for which str() and repr() yield different results.
This closes SF bug #485446.
---
Doc/tut/tut.tex | 29 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
1 file changed, 26 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Doc/tut/tut.tex b/Doc/tut/tut.tex
index e90c267..f02b3ff 100644
--- a/Doc/tut/tut.tex
+++ b/Doc/tut/tut.tex
@@ -2638,11 +2638,34 @@ string to be applied to the right argument, and returns the string
resulting from this formatting operation.
One question remains, of course: how do you convert values to strings?
-Luckily, Python has a way to convert any value to a string: pass it to
-the \function{repr()} function, or just write the value between
-reverse quotes (\code{``}). Some examples:
+Luckily, Python has ways to convert any value to a string: pass it to
+the \function{repr()} or \function{str()} functions, or just write
+the value between reverse quotes (\code{``}, equivalent to
+\function{repr()}).
+
+The \function{str()} function is meant to return representations of
+values which are fairly human-readable, while \function{repr()} is
+meant to generate representations which can be read by the interpreter
+(or will force a \exception{SyntaxError} if there is not equivalent
+syntax). For objects which don't have a particular representation for
+human consumption, \function{str()} will return the same value as
+\function{repr()}. Many values, such as numbers or structures like
+lists and dictionaries, have the same representation using either
+function. Strings and floating point numbers, in particular, have two
+distinct representations.
+
+Some examples:
\begin{verbatim}
+>>> s = 'Hello, world.'
+>>> str(s)
+'Hello, world.'
+>>> `s`
+"'Hello, world.'"
+>>> str(0.1)
+'0.1'
+>>> `0.1`
+'0.10000000000000001'
>>> x = 10 * 3.25
>>> y = 200 * 200
>>> s = 'The value of x is ' + `x` + ', and y is ' + `y` + '...'
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