So far we have seen how to output/print a result and display it on the screen. Often you'll want to take input from a user and assign it to a variable . We can do the same using the input() function in Python. It has a very basic syntax :

• a = input()

Note that if the data type of the input variable is not specified , then the default data type is a string . If you want to take an integer, for instance , as input then simply assign the int type to the variable in the following way :

• a = int(input())

Let us take an example to understand this clearly.

a = input()
print(a)
b = int(input())
print(3*b).

22
2

22
6

Sometimes it is required to take space-separated objects as input , to do the same in Python , we will be using the lists and the split() method ( Do remember that by default the split method would remove the spaces in a string). This can be done in the following way :

• my_variable = list(input().split())

a = list(input().split())
print(a)

1 2 3 4

['1' , '2' , '3' ,'4']

Note that in the above method , the objects in the list will be stored in form of a string . In order to store the objects with a specific data type , we will need to use the map() function . We will be discussing this function in much more detail in the later sections of the tutorial , but for now the syntax for taking input() becomes :

• my_variable = list(map(int,input().split()))

Let us see this method in action in the example given below.

a = list(map(int,input().split()))
print(a)
print(type(a[0]))

1 2 3 4

[1, 2, 3, 4]
<class 'int'>