While python 3.6 has been out for over a year I recently stumbled across one feature that I wasn’t aware of: f-strings!

What are they?

f-strings (short for format-strings I assume) are a way of simplifying your string variable representation. Just prefix your string with f and then directly call your arguements inside curly braces.

speed='quick'
animal='fox'
number=10000
print(f'The {speed} brown {animal} jumped {number} meters over the moon')
>> 'The quick brown fox jumped 10000 meters over the moon'

This can be contrasted with the old way of doing it (Python 3.x.y where x < 6 and Python 2.7.y) using .format()

speed='quick'
animal='fox'
number=10000
print('The {speed} brown {animal} jumped {number} meters over the moon'.format(speed=speed, animal=animal, number=number))
>> 'The quick brown fox jumped 10000 meters over the moon'

or the really old way of doing it (using older version of Python 2.x.y where x < 7)

speed='quick'
animal='fox'
number=10000
print('The %s brown %s jumped %d meters over the moon' % (speed, animal, number))
>> 'The quick brown fox jumped 10000 meters over the moon'

Looks like a great feature to make your strings parsing a bit more compact and from now on I will favour this over the .format() approach.

You might ask whether introducing another way to format strings breaks the Zen of Python (There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.) and you can find quite a few rants online from people unhappy about this but I think as form of syntactic sugar is a nice addition.