Introducing Python - Beginning Python Games Development With Pygame (2015)

Beginning Python Games Development With Pygame (2015)

CHAPTER 1

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Introducing Python

The programming language that we are going to use to create games is Python, which gets its name because the original author of the language was a fan of the UK television series Monty Python. While we will be using Python to create games, the language is a general-purpose programming language that is used for things like data analysis, robotics, creating websites, and much more. Companies and agencies such as Google, NASA, and Instagram rely heavily on Python.

There are plenty of alternative languages that can be used to create games, but I have chosen Python because it has the tendency to take care of the details and leave you—the programmer—to concentrate on solving problems. For our purposes, solving problems means displaying game characters on the screen, making them look great, and having them interact with a virtual environment.

This chapter is a friendly introduction to Python; it will get you up to speed with the language so that you can read the sample code and start writing code of your own. If you are familiar with Python, then feel free to skip the first two chapters. Read on if you are completely new to Python or if you would like a refresher course.

To start working with Python, you will first need to install a Python interpreter for your computer. There are versions for PC, Linux, and Mac. We will be using version 3.4 of Python for this book. To get Python, head to http://python.org/downloads.

Image Note By the time this book is published, there may be a later version of Python available. The differences between Python 2 and Python 3 are fairly significant, though future updates are expected to be minor. Feel free to download the latest version of Python.

Your First Look at Python

The usual way of running Python code is to save it to a file and then run it. We will be doing this soon, but for now we are going to use Python in interactive mode, which lets us enter code a line at a time and receive immediate feedback. You will find this to be one of Python’s strengths. It is an excellent aid to learning the language, and is often used by experienced programmers for topics such as data analysis because you can easily change one line and see the instant output.

Once you have installed Python on your system, you can run it like any other program. If you have Windows, it is simply a matter of double-clicking the icon or selecting it in the Start menu. For other systems with a command line, just type "python" to launch Python in interactive mode. If you have both Python 2 and Python 3 installed, you may need to type python3 instead of just "python".

When you first run the Python interpreter, you will see something like the following:

Python 3.4.2 (v3.4.2:ab2c023a9432, Oct 6 2014, 22:16:31)
[MSC v.1600 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license()" for more information.
>>>

The text may vary depending on the version of Python you are running and the platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) you are running it on. The important part is the three chevrons (>>>), which is the Python prompt—is your invitation to type in some code, which Python then attempts to run.

A long-standing tradition in computer language tutorials is that the first program you write displays the text “Hello, World!” on the screen—and who am I to break with tradition! So take a deep breath and type print("Hello, World!") after the prompt. The Python window now displays this on the prompt line:

>>> print("Hello, World!")

If you press the Enter key, Python will run the line of code you just entered, and if all goes well you will see this on the screen:

>>> print("Hello, World!")
Hello, World!
>>> _

Python has executed your line of code, displayed the result, and given you a new prompt to enter more code. So how exactly does our line of code work? The word print is a function that tells Python to print what follows to the screen. Following the print function is a string, which is simply a collection of letters and/or digits. Python treats anything between quotes (") as a string. Try entering your own text between the quote marks and you should find that Python will print it to the screen just as before.

Numbers

We will come back to strings later, but for now let’s start with the simplest piece of information that Python can work with: numbers. Python is so good at working with numbers that you can use it almost like a calculator. To see it in action, type the following into Python (you don’t need to type the prompt, because Python displays it for you):

>>> 2+2

Take a guess at what Python will make of this line and hit Enter. If you guessed 4, help yourself to a cookie—that is exactly what it does. Python has evaluated 2+2, which in Python terms is known as an expression, and displayed the result. You can also use – for subtract, * for multiply, and / for divide. These symbols are known as operators. You will probably use +, –, *, and / the most. Here are some examples:

>>> 10–5
5
>>> 2*4
8
>>> 6/2+1
4
>>> –2+7
5

In the real world there is only one kind of number, but computers—and consequently Python—have several ways of representing numbers. The two most commonly used types of number are the integer and the float. Integers are whole numbers with no decimal point, whereas floats do have a decimal point and can store fractional values. Often it is obvious which one you should use—for instance, if your game has the concept of lives, you would use an integer to store them because you are not likely to have half a life or 3.673 lives. Float values are more often used for real-world values that need precision—for example, in a racing game your car may have a speed of 92.4302 miles per hour, which you would store in a float.

So far the numbers you have entered have been integers. To tell Python a number is a float, simply include a decimal point. For example, 5 and 10 are integers, but 5. and 10.0 are floats.

>>> 3/2
1.5
>>> 3.0/2.
1.5
>>> 3./2.
1.5

In addition to the basic math there are a number of other things you can do with numbers. Parentheses are used to ensure that something is calculated first; here is an example:

>>> 3/2+1
2.5
>>> 3/(2+1)
1.0

The first line calculates 3 divided by 2 first and then adds 1, giving the result 2.5. The second line calculates 2 plus 1 first, and so the result works out as 3 divided by 3, which is 1.

Another operator at your disposal is the power operator, which raises a value to a power. For instance, 2 to the power of 3 is the same as 2*2*2. The power operator is ** and works on integers and floats. Here are two examples of the power operator in action:

>>> 2**3
8
>>> 3.0**4
81.0

Python 3 handles calculations and number information in a very expectable way, unlike its predecessor, or many other languages. Many languages have a range from -2147 million to 2147 million, giving you a range of a bit over 4 billion. Python 3, however, is not bounded like this.

Let’s create a large number by calculating 2 to the power of 100, which is 2×2×2×2…×2 repeated 100 times.

>>> 2**100
1267650600228229401496703205376

Now that is a big number! If you are feeling brave, try calculating 2**1000 or even 2**10000 and watch your screen fill up with massive numbers.

Let’s introduce you to one more operator before the next section. The modulus (%) operator calculates the remainder of a division. For example, 15 modulus 6 is 3, because 6 goes into 15 two times with 3 left over. Let’s ask Python to do this for us:

>>> 15%6
3

With this handful of operators, you now can calculate anything that can be calculated, whether it is a 15 percent tip on two plates of fugu-sashi or the damage done by an orc hitting armor with a +1 axe.

I don’t know much about orcs, but let’s calculate that tip on two plates of fugu-sashi (raw blowfish, a delicacy in Japan that I hope to try one day). Fugu is quite expensive, anything up to $200, because, if it isn’t prepared by specially trained chefs, eating it can be fatal! Let’s say we find a restaurant in Tokyo that serves a tempting plate of fugu for $100. We can use Python to calculate the tip for us:

>>> (100*2)*15/100
30.0

This calculates 15 percent of the price of two $100 plates—a $30 tip. Good enough for this restaurant but the numbers will change depending on where we buy our fugu and the quality of the service. We can make this clearer and more flexible by using variables. A variable is a label for a value, and when you create a variable you can use it in place of the number itself. In our tip calculation we could have three variables: the price of the fugu, the number of plates, and the tip percentage. To create a variable, type its name followed by an equal sign (=), then the value you want to give it:

>>> price = 100
>>> plates = 2
>>> tip = 15

The equal sign (=) is known as an assignment operator.

Image Caution Python variables are case sensitive, which means that if the variable names are capitalized differently, Python will treat them as being completely unique—which means Apples, APPLES, and ApPlEs are treated as three different variables.

We can now use these three variables in place of numbers. Let’s calculate our tip again:

>>> (price*plates)*(tip/100)
30.0

This calculates the same value, but now it is a little clearer because we can tell at a glance what the numbers represent. It’s also a lot more flexible, because we can change the variables and redo the calculation. Let’s say we have fugu for breakfast the following morning, but at a cheaper restaurant ($75 a plate), where the service is not quite as good and only worth a 5 percent tip:

>>> price = 75
>>> tip = 5
>>> (price*plates)*(tip/100.)
7.5

That’s a $7.50 tip because the waiter was slow to bring the sake, and I hate to wait for my sake.

Strings

Another piece of information that Python can store is the string. A string is a collection of characters (a character is a letter, number, symbol, etc.) and can be used to store literally any kind of information. A string could contain an image, a sound file, or even a video, but the most common use for strings is to store text. To enter a string in Python, enclose it in either single quotes (') or double quotes ("). Here are two strings; both contain exactly the same information:

"Hello"
'Hello'

So why have more than one way of creating a string? Good question; let’s say we want to store the sentence:

I said “hocus pocus” to the wizard.

If we put the entire sentence in a string with double quotes, Python has no way of knowing that you want to end the string after the word wizard, and will assume that the string ends at the space after said. Let’s try it and see what happens:

>>> print("I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.")
Traceback ( File "<interactive input>", line 1
print("I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.")
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Python has thrown an exception. More about exceptions later in the book, but for now if you see an exception like this, Python is telling you that something is wrong with the code you entered. We can get around the problem of including quotes in strings by using the alternative quote symbol. Let’s try the same sentence, but with single quotes (') this time:

>>> print('I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.')
I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.

Python is quite happy with this, and does not throw an exception this time. This is probably the easiest way around the quote problem, but there are alternatives. If you type a backslash character (\) before a quote, it tells Python that you don’t want to end the string here—you just want to include the quote symbol in the string. The backslash character is known as the "escape character" in Python. Here is an example:

>>> print("I said \"hocus pocus\" to the wizard.")
I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.

This solves the problem in a different way, but the result is the same. At the risk of burdening you with too much information, there is one more way of defining strings: if you begin a string with triple single (''') or triple double quotes ("""), Python knows not to end the string until it reaches another set of the same type of triple quotes. This is useful because text rarely contains three quotes in row. Here’s our wizard string again using triple quotes:

>>> print("""I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.""")
I said "hocus pocus" to the wizard.

Concatenating Strings

So now you have several ways of creating strings, but what can you do with them? Just like numbers, strings have operators that can be used to create new strings. If you add two strings together, you get a new string containing the first string with the second string appended to the end. You can add strings with the + operator just like you do with numbers; let’s try it:

>>> "I love "+"Python!"
'I love Python!'

Python has added two strings together and displayed the result. Adding strings together like this is called string concatenation. You can concatenate any two strings, but you can’t concatenate a string with a number. Let’s try it anyway to see what happens:

>>> "high "+5
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: cannot concatenate 'str' and 'int' objects

Here we have tried to produce the string 'high 5' by adding the number 5 to a string. This doesn’t make sense to Python, and it lets you know by throwing another exception. If you do want to add a number to a string, you have to first convert the number to a string. You can easily create strings from numbers by constructing a new string from that number. Here’s how you would create our high 5 string.

>>> "high "+str(5)
'high 5'

This works because str(5) constructs a string from the number 5, which Python will happily concatenate with another string.

You can also use the multiply (*) operator with strings, but you can only multiply strings by integers. Take a guess at what the following line of Python code will do:

>>> 'eek! '*10

You can see that Python can be quite intuitive; if you multiply a string by 10 it will repeat it 10 times. Strings do not support all mathematical operators such as / and –, because it’s not intuitive what they would do. What could "apples"–"oranges" possibly mean?

Parsing Strings

Since a string can be thought of as a collection of characters, it is often useful to be able to refer to parts of it rather than as a whole. Python does this with the index operator, which consists of square brackets [], containing the offset of the character. The first character is [0], the second is[1], the third is [2], and so forth. Starting at 0 rather than 1 may seem a little odd, but it is a tradition among computer languages, and you will find it actually simplifies things when you write more Python code. Let’s see string indexing in action. First we will create a variable containing a string, which we do just like numbers:

>>> my_string = 'fugu-sashi'
>>> print(my_string)
'fugu-sashi'

Normally you would give strings a better name, but for this little example we will just call it my_string (the underscore character between my and string is used in place of a space because Python does not allow spaces in variable names). We can pick out individual letters from the string with the index operator:

>>> my_string[0]
'f'
>>> my_string[3]
'u'

my_string[0] gives you a string with the first character in fugu-sashi, which is f. The second line gives you the fourth character, because the first character is offset 0 and not 1. Try to think of the offset not as the number of the character itself, but as the spaces betweencharacters (see Figure 1-1); this will make the indexing a little more intuitive.

9781484209714_Fig01-01

Figure 1-1. String indexing

Let’s say we want to find the last character in a string. You can see from Figure 1-1 that the last character is “i” at offset 9, but what if we don’t know the string ahead of time? We could have extracted the string from a file, or the player may have typed it in a high score table. To find the last offset, we first need to find the length of the string, which we can do with the len function. Think of a function as stored Python code; you pass the function some information, which it uses to carry out an action and then return, possibly with new information. This is exactly what lendoes; we give it a string and it returns the length of that string. Let’s try the len function on my_string:

>>> len(my_string)
10

There are 10 characters in my_string, but we can’t use 10 as an offset because it is right at the end of the string. To get the end character, we need the offset before 10, which is simply 9, so we subtract 1. Here’s how to use len to find the last character in a string:

>>> my_string[len(my_string)-1]
'i'

Easy enough, I hope you will agree! But Python can make it even easier for us by using negative indexing. If you index with a negative number, Python treats it as an offset from the end of the string, so [-1] is the last character, [-2] is the second-to-last character, and so forth (seeFigure 1-2).

9781484209714_Fig01-02

Figure 1-2. Negative indexing

We can now find the last character with a little less code:

>>> my_string[-1]
'i'

Slicing Strings

In addition to extracting individual characters in a string, you can pick out groups of characters by slicing strings. Slicing works a lot like indexing, but you use two offsets separated by a colon (:) character. The first offset is where Python should start slicing from; the second offset is where it should stop slicing. Again, think of the offsets as the spaces between the characters, not as the characters themselves.

>>> my_string[2:4]
'gu'
>>> my_string[5:10]
'sashi'

The first line tells Python to slice between offset 2 and 4. You can see from the diagram that there are two characters between these offsets: g and u. Python returns them as a single string, 'gu'. The second line slices the string between offsets 5 and 10 and returns the string 'sashi'. If you leave out the first offset, Python uses the start of the string; if you leave out the second, it uses the end of the string.

>>> my_string[:4]
'fugu'
>>> my_string[5:]
'sashi'

Slicing can take one more value that is used as the step value. If the step value is 1 or you don’t supply it, Python will simply return the slice between the first two offsets. If you slice with a step value of 2, then a string with every second character of the original will be returned. A step of 3 will return every third character, and so on. Here are some examples of this kind of slicing:

>>> my_string[::2]
'fg-ah'
>>> my_string[1::3]
'u-s'

The first line slices from the beginning to the end of the string (because the first two offsets are omitted), but since the step value is 2, it takes every second character. The second line starts from offset 1 (at u) and slices to the end, taking every third character. The step value in a slice can also be negative, which has an interesting effect. When Python sees a negative step, it reverses the order of the slicing so that it goes down from the second offset to the first. You can use this feature to easily reverse a string:

>>> my_string[::-1]
'ihsas-uguf'
>>> my_string[::-2]
'issuu'

The first line simply returns a string with the characters in reverse order. Because the step value is negative, it goes from the end of the string to the beginning.

String Methods

Along with these operators, strings have a number of methods, which are functions contained within Python objects and that carry out some action on them. Python strings contain a number of useful methods to help you work with strings. Here are a just few of them, applied to our fugu string:

>>> my_string.upper()
'FUGU-SASHI'
>>> my_string.capitalize()
'Fugu-sashi'
>>> my_string.title()
'Fugu-Sashi'

Here we are applying various methods to a string. Each one returns a new string modified in some way. We can see that upper returns a string with all letters converted to uppercase, capitalize returns a new string with the first character converted to a capital, and title returns a new string with the first character of each word converted to a capital. These methods don’t require any other information, but the parentheses are still necessary to tell Python to call the function.

Image Note Python strings are immutable, which means that you can’t modify a string once created, but you can create new strings from it. In practice you will rarely notice this, because creating new strings is so easy (that’s what we've been doing this whole time)!

Lists and Tuples

Like most languages, Python has ways of storing groups of objects, which is fortunate because a game with only one alien, one bullet, or one weapon would be quite dull! Python objects that store other objects are known as collections, and one of the simplest and most often used collection is the list. Let’s start by creating an empty list:

>>> my_list=[]

The square brackets create an empty list, which is then assigned to the variable my_list. To add something to a list you can use the append method, which tacks any Python object you give it onto the end. Let’s pretend our list is going to hold our shopping for the week, and add a couple of items:

>>> my_list.append('chopsticks')
>>> my_list.append('soy sauce')

Here we have added two strings to my_list, but we could just as easily have added any other of Python’s objects, including other lists. If you now type my_list at the Python prompt, it will display the contents of it for you:

>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'soy sauce']

Here we can see that the two strings are now stored inside the list. We cannot live on chopsticks and soy sauce alone, so let’s add a few more items to our shopping list:

>>> my_list.append('wasabi')
>>> my_list.append('fugu')
>>> my_list.append('sake')
>>> my_list.append('apple pie')
>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'soy sauce', 'wasabi', 'fugu', 'sake', 'apple pie']

Modifying List Items

Python lists are mutable, which means you can change them after they have been created. So as well as retrieving the contents of a list with the index operator, you can change the item at any index by assigning a new item to it. Let’s say we specifically want to get dark soy sauce; we can change the second item by assigning it a new value with the assignment operator (=):

>>> my_list[1]='dark soy sauce'
>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'dark soy sauce', 'wasabi', 'fugu', 'sake', 'apple pie']

Removing List Items

Along with changing items in a list, you can remove items from it. Let’s say we want to remove apple pie because it just doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of our shopping list. We can do this with the del operator, which will remove any item from our list—in this case, it is the last item, so we will use negative indexing:

>>> del my_list[-1]
>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'dark soy sauce', 'wasabi', 'fugu', 'sake']

Lists support a number of operators that work in a similar way to strings. Let’s look at slicing and indexing, which you should find very familiar:

>>> my_list[2]
'wasabi'
>>> my_list[-1]
'sake'

The first line returns the string at offset 2, which is the third slot in our shopping list. Just like strings, the first item in a list is always 0. The second line uses negative indexing, and just like strings [-1] returns the last item.

Slicing lists works similar to slicing strings, with the exception that they return a new list rather than a string. Let’s slice our shopping list into two portions:

>>> my_list[:2]
['chopsticks', 'dark soy sauce']
>>> my_list[2:]
['wasabi', 'fugu', 'sake']
>>>

In the first slice we have asked Python to give us all the items from the beginning of the list to offset 2; in the second slice we have asked for everything from offset 2 to the end of the list. List offsets work just like string offsets, so try to think of them as the spaces between objects in the list and not the objects themselves. Therefore, offset 0 is before the first item and offset 1 is after the first item and before the second.

You can also add lists together with the + operator. When you add lists together, it creates a single list containing the items from both lists. Let’s create a new list and add it to our shopping list:

>>> my_list2 = ['ramen', 'shiitake mushrooms']
>>> my_list += my_list2
>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'dark soy sauce', 'wasabi', 'fugu', 'sake', 'ramen', image
'shiitake mushrooms']

The first line creates a new list of strings called my_list2. We have created this second list slightly differently from the first; instead of creating a blank list and adding items to it one at a time, we have created a list with two items already in there. The second line uses the += operator, which is useful shorthand: my_list+=my_list2 is the same as my_list=my_list+my_list2, which has the effect of adding the two lists together and storing the result back in my_list.

List Methods

Along with these operators, lists support a number of methods. Let’s use the sort method to sort our shopping list into alphabetical order:

>>> my_list.sort()
>>> my_list
['chopsticks', 'dark soy sauce', 'fugu', 'ramen', 'sake', image
'shiitake mushrooms', 'wasabi']

The sort method sorts the contents of the list. The order depends on the contents of the list, but for a list of strings the sort is in alphabetical order.

You will notice that Python doesn’t print anything after the call to sort; this is because the sort does not return a sorted list but just sorts the list it was called on. The second line is necessary to ask Python to display the contents of our list.

Let’s say we are going shopping and we want to take an item off the list and go looking for it in the supermarket. We can do this with the pop method, which removes an item from the list and returns it:

>>> my_list.pop(0)
'chopsticks'

We have asked my_list to “pop” the item at offset 0, which is chopsticks. If we now display the contents of the shopping list, we should see that the first item has indeed been removed:

>>> my_list
['fugu', 'ramen', 'sake', 'shiitake mushrooms', 'soy sauce', 'wasabi']

There are more list methods than we have covered here; see Table 1-1 for more.

Table 1-1. Python List Methods

Method Method

Description

append

Appends items to the list

count

Counts the number of times an item occurs in a list

extend

Adds items from another collection

index

Finds the offset of a string

insert

Inserts an item into the list

pop

Removes an item at an offset from the list and returns it

remove

Removes a particular item from a list

reverse

Reverses the list

sort

Sorts the list

Tuples

Another collection we are going to introduce in this section is the tuple. Tuples are similar to lists with the exception that they are immutable; that is, like strings, once they have been created the contents cannot be changed. Tuples are generally used in preference to lists when the information they contain is tied together in some way—for example, a tuple could represent a phone number and area code because both parts are required to dial. They are created in a similar way to lists, but use parentheses, (), rather than square brackets. Let’s create a tuple that stores the phone number of our favorite sushi take-out place:

>>> my_tuple=('555', 'EATFUGU')
>>> my_tuple
('555', 'EATFUGU')

Here we have created a tuple with two strings containing the area code and number of our fugu takeaway. To prove a tuple is immutable, let’s try appending an item to it:

>>> my_tuple.append('ramen')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
AttributeError: 'tuple' object has no attribute 'append'

Python has thrown an AttributeError exception, letting you know that tuples do not support append. You will get similar results if you try to do anything that modifies the tuple. Tuples do support all the indexing and slicing operators, however, because these operators don’t modify the tuple.

>>> my_tuple[0]
'555'
>>> my_tuple[1]
'EATFUGU'

Unpacking

Because tuples are often used to pass around group values, Python gives you a simple way of extracting them called unpacking. Let’s unpack our tuple into two variables: one for the area code and one for the number.

>>> my_tuple=('555', 'EATFUGU')
>>> area_code, number = my_tuple
>>> area_code
'555'
>>> number
'EATFUGU'

Here you can see that in a single line, Python has unpacked the two parts of our tuple into two separate values. Unpacking actually works for lists and other Python objects, but you will most often use it with tuples.

Another way to extract the values in a tuple is to convert it into a list. You can do this by constructing a list with the tuple as a parameter—for example, list(my_tuple) returns the list equivalent, which is ['555', 'EATFUGU']. You can also do the reverse and create a tuple by calling tuple on a list— for example, tuple(['555', 'EATFUGU']) returns our original tuple.

You will learn the best places to use tuples over lists in the following chapters; for now use the rule of thumb that you should use a tuple if you never need to modify the contents.

Image Note Creating a tuple with one or zero items is a little different from lists. This is because Python also uses parentheses to define the priority in math-like expressions. To define a tuple with just one item, add a comma after the item; to define an empty tuple, just include the comma by itself in parentheses. For example, ('ramen',) is a tuple with one item, and (,) is an empty tuple.

Dictionaries

The final collection type we are going to look at is the dictionary. The previous collections we looked at have all been sequence collections, because the values are in a sequence from first to last and you access them by their position within the list. Dictionaries are mapping collections because they map one piece of information to another. We could use a dictionary to store the prices of our shopping list by mapping the name of the food item to its price. Let’s say that fugu costs $100 and ramen costs $5; we can create a dictionary that holds this information as follows:

>>> my_dictionary={'ramen': 5.0, 'fugu': 100.0}

The curly braces create a dictionary. Inside the braces we have the string 'ramen' followed by a colon, then the number 5.0 (price in dollars). This tells Python that the string maps to the number; in other words, we can look up the price if we have the name of the food item. Multiple items in a dictionary are separated with a comma; in this example we have a second item that maps 'fugu' to the value 100.0.

To retrieve that information, we use the square brackets ([]) operator again, passing in the key we want to search for (in this case the key is either fugu or ramen). The dictionary returns the value associated with the key—the price of the item. Let’s look up our two keys:

>>> my_dictionary['fugu']
100.0
>>> my_dictionary['ramen']
5.0

You can also add new items to the dictionary by assigning new values to it:

>>> my_dictionary['chopsticks']=7.50
>>> my_dictionary['sake']=19.95
>>> my_dictionary
{'sake': 19.0, 'ramen': 5.0, 'chopsticks': 7.5, 'fugu': 100.0}

Here we have added two new items to the dictionary. You may have noticed that when Python displays the list for us, the items are in a different order than the way we originally created it. This is because dictionaries don’t have any notion of order for keys in a dictionary and what you see displayed is in no particular order. The important thing is that Python remembers what key maps to what value—which it does very well!

Loops

A loop is a way of running through a piece of code more than once. Loops are fundamental in programming languages, and you will find that almost every line of code you write in a game is inside some kind of loop. Like many other programming languages, Python has two types of loop to handle all your looping needs: the while loop and the for loop.

While Loops

A while loop is used when you repeat a piece of code only when, or while, a condition is true. Let’s use a simple while loop to display the numbers from 1 to 5. We’ll start by entering the following lines in the interpreter:

>>> count=1
>>> while count<=5:
...

When you hit Enter after the second line, you will notice that instead of the usual Python prompt you now see three periods (...). This is because the colon at the end of the line indicates that there is more code to follow. In the case of a while loop, it is the code that we want to be repeated.

All languages need some way to mark the beginning and end of code blocks. Some use symbols like curly braces ({ }), and others use words like do and end. Python does things slightly differently and uses indentation to define blocks of code. To tell Python that a line of code is part of the block and not the rest of the code, insert a tab before the line (by pressing the Tab key):

... print(count)
... count+=1

Image Note On some systems you may find that a tab is automatically inserted on the first line of a block. This can be convenient if there is a lot of code in a block. Delete the tab and press Enter as normal to end the block.

Press Enter twice after the last line; the blank line tells the interpreter that you have finished entering the code block. The while loop now runs and displays the numbers 1 through 5. So how does this work? Well, after the while statement is a condition (count<=5), which can be read as “Is count less than or equal to 5?” The first time Python encounters the while loop, count is 1, which satisfies our condition of being less than or equal to 5—so Python runs the code block. The two lines in the code block first print the value of count, then add one to it. The second time around, count is 2, which also satisfies the condition and we go around the loop again. Eventually count becomes 6, which is definitely not less than or equal to 5, and this time Python skips the code block.

Less than or equal to (<=) is just one comparison operator. See Table 1-2 for others you can use.

Table 1-2. Comparison Operators

Operator

Description

<

Less than

<=

Less than or equal to

>

Greater than

>=

Greater than or equal to

==

Equal to

!=

Not equal to

Image Caution Be careful with your loops! If you use a condition that is always true, such as 2>1, Python will keep going round the loop forever. If you do end up in this pickle, press Ctrl+C to stop Python in its tracks. Every programmer has been stuck in an infinite loop at least once!

For Loops

While loops have their uses and it is important you know how to use them, but often the for loop is a better choice. A for loop runs through an iterable Python object, giving you a new value until there are no more items remaining. You have met iterables before: lists, tuples, dictionaries, and even strings are all iterable objects. Let’s rewrite the while loop example as a for loop:

>>> for count in range(0,6):
... print(count)

Here we are iterating over the result of the range function, which creates a list of values from the first parameter up to—but not including—the second parameter.

As you can see, the call to range has created a list containing the numbers 0 through 5, which is exactly what we want to display inside our loop. When Python first goes through the for loop, it picks the first value from the list and assigns it to the variable count; it then runs the code in the loop, which simply prints the current value of count to the screen. The loop finishes after five passes, when it reaches the end of the list.

If you want to start at any number other than 0, you will need both parameters, but try doing:

>>> for count in range(6):
print(count)

Image Note You should see that you get the same output as before.

Python in Practice

Before we move on to the next chapter, let’s put what we have learned to some practical use. Mental arithmetic has never been one of my strong points, so I’d like to write a small piece of Python code to run through our shopping list and find the total price. We’ll start by creating a list containing our groceries for the week and a dictionary that maps the name of each item on to its price:

>>> shopping=['fugu', 'ramen', 'sake', 'shiitake mushrooms', 'soy sauce', 'wasabi']
>>> prices={'fugu':100.0, 'ramen':5.0, 'sake':45.0, 'shiitake mushrooms':3.5, 'soy sauce':7.50, 'wasabi':10.0}
>>> total=0.00

Okay, great. We now have two Python collections that store all the information regarding our groceries, and a variable to store the total. What we need to do now is loop through shopping, look up each price in prices, and add it to total:

>>> for item in shopping:
... total+= prices[item]
>>> total
171.0

That’s all it takes! The variable total now holds the sum of every item in our shopping list, and we can see the grand total is a very reasonable $171. Don’t worry, the sample code in the following chapters will be much more entertaining than a grocery list!

Summary

We have explored some of the basic Python constructs in this first chapter, most of which you will use regularly when writing new code. You can think of what you have learned so far as the most basic tools of the trade when it comes to writing games and other Python programs. The data (numbers and strings) and collections (tuples, list, and dictionaries) are particularly fundamental because you can store every aspect of a game within them.

In the following chapter you will learn how to fit together what you have learned to create more sophisticated programs. You will discover how to use logic, create functions, and leverage the power of object-oriented programming.