IDLE and Python 2.7

[J Swarthout]

Hey everyone

I'm new to Ubuntu/Linux and programming in Python as well. I installed Ubuntu on my parents old dell yesterday. The last two weeks or so I've been learning Python. I installed idle on my windows computers and haven't had any issues using it so far. Now I'm trying to use IDLE for Ubuntu and am having quite a few problems. I'm new to this so if these seem like dumb questions please bear with me. Any help would be appreciated.

-When I write a file in IDLE and save it to a file on my desktop with the .py extension and then proceed to click on it, instead of executing the file like it does in windows it just comes up as a text file with the code. In windows a command prompt comes up and executes the file as written.

-I wrote the following code

name = input("Hi. What's your name? ")
print(name)
print("Hi,", name)
input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.")

When I run this in the shell it will prompt me to enter my name like it should. Then after entering it I get this big error message in red print.

Maybe I'm missing something simple here-any help would be appreciated.

[samitharansara]

I'm not sure what you are after, but I assume you want to execute a .py script without typing

python myscript.py

in a terminal.

So the first thing you should do is , give the path to the interpreter. As such, include this line on the top of your file

#!/usr/bin/env python

Then make your .py file an executable..

$ chmod +x myscript.py

And to run it, type

./myscript.py

[J Swarthout]

Ok so when I write this code

name = "Steveo"
print(name)
print("Hi,", name)

input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.")

This is the output I get from IDLE

Steveo
('Hi,', 'Steveo')


Press the enter key to exit.

I push enter and get this

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/steve/Desktop/PythonFiles/steveo.py", line 5, in <module>
input("\n\nPress the enter key to exit.")
File "<string>", line 0

^
SyntaxError: unexpected EOF while parsing

and its in red. When I do this on my windows machine it works as it should.

[Bachstelze]

Never ever use input() in Python 2.x. Always use raw_input(). the reason you are getting this error is that Python is trying to parse the string you get it (and fails, because there is nothing for it to parse).

[J Swarthout]

Thank you so much. One more question. Why does the

Hi,Steveo

come out like this

('Hi,','Steveo')

[Bachstelze]

Because in Python 2, print is a statement, not a function. You should do

print "Hi,", name

If you wrap parentheses around it, you create a tuple.

[J Swarthout]

Thanks again. I'm currently reading this book

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Program...8137549&sr=8-1

to learn python. And while its a great book thus far I had no idea the syntax only worked on windows computers-I had no idea there were so many differences.

[Bachstelze]

Python is the same on all platforms, if you have the same version of Python. From the looks of it, your book seems to be using Python 3, so you should use that.

[J Swarthout]

That's what did it, Thank You!

[Ravi5kumar]

So the first thing you should do is , give the path to the interpreter. As such, include this line on the top of your file

#!/usr/bin/env python

This is not working for me! I am using IDLE 2.7 on ubuntu 12.04..