Scripting with Raw Input

We can get raw input from the user with the built-in function input, which takes in an optional string argument that you can use to specify a message to show to the user when asking for input.

name = input("Enter your name: ")
print("Hello there, {}!".format(name.title()))

This prompts the user to enter a name and then uses the input in a greeting. The input function takes in whatever the user types and stores it as a string. If you want to interpret their input as something other than a string, like an integer, as in the example below, you need to wrap the result with the new type to convert it from a string.

num = int(input("Enter an integer"))
print("hello" * num)

We can also interpret user input as a Python expression using the built-in function eval. This function evaluates a string as a line of Python.

result = eval(input("Enter an expression: "))
print(result)

If the user inputs 2 * 3, this outputs 6.