# Functions¶

## Introduction¶

Some tasks in your code may be performed a lot of times. Say you want to say “Hello” not only to the world but to a lot of people. You would have to write

print('Hello, {name}!')


an awful lot of times. It would be way shorter if we were able to write

greet('{name}')


and it would just print Hello, {name}!. OK, it is not that shorter… But imagine you want to find the roots of some functions. There is way more code involved and having a nice little shortcut to execute all that code without writing it over and over again would be nice, wouldn’t it? This is in the spirit of the DRY principle! As a nice side effect you only have to change the routine in one place of your code instead of all of them if you find a bug or want to use some more sophisticated routine.

But even if you do only use a code snippet once in your program it may be more declarative to give it a short name and hide the implementation somewhere else. This also helps you to divide and conquer larger problems!

The nice thing is that you already know a function: print()! You used it like this:

print('Hello, World!')


Let’s take a closer look at the parts that make up a function.

## Components of a function¶

### Name¶

Most functions have names [1]. The name of print() is – never would have guessed – print. Printing the function without calling it reveals that it is a built-in function:

>>> print(print)
<built-in function print>


There are a lot more Built-in Functions, among them, for example, float().

### Positional arguments¶

float() is a function that lets you convert a number or a string that represents a number to a floating point number. Its interface is defined as

float(x)

where x is its argument. To be more precise it is its positional argument. By calling float() and passing an integer as argument the result is the corresponding float:

>>> float(1)
1.0
>>> float(-2)
-2.0


You can also pass strings that represent numbers to float():

>>> float('1')
1.0
>>> float('-2')
-2.0
>>> float('1.500')
1.5
>>> float('1e-2')
0.01
>>> float('+1E6')
1000000.0


A similar function also exists for integer. It is the function int().

### Keyword arguments¶

int() is a function that lets you convert a number or a string that represents a number to an integer. Its interface is defined as

int(x, base=10)

where x is its positional argument and base is its keyword argument. While positional arguments must be passed to a function keyword arguments are optional and provide default values. The default value of base is 10.

When passing floats to int() everything after the decimal point is dropped:

>>> int(1.0)
1
>>> int(-2.0)
-2
>>> int(1.3)
1
>>> int(1.8)
1
>>> int(-1.3)
-1
>>> int(-1.8)
-1


When passing strings to int() the base keyword argument is used to indicate how the number should be interpreted in terms of which base it is given in.

>>> int('1')
1
>>> int('-2')
-2
>>> int('101010')
101010
>>> int('101010', base=2)
42


You do not have to write out the keyword arguments, they will be interpreted in the same order as they are in the interface:

>>> int('101010', 2)
42


But you can not convert strings that represent floating point numbers to integers like this:

>>> int('1.0')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: '1.0'


For this you would have to chain int() and float():

>>> int(float('1.0'))
1


## Defining a function¶

A function is defined by starting with the def keyword. Subsequently you provide the name of the function and its arguments in paranthesis. You can then use it like the functions you already used.

>>> def greet(name):
...     print('Hello', name)
...
>>> greet('World')
Hello World
>>> greet('you')
Hello you

>>> def add_reciprocal(a, b):
...     return 1/a + 1/b
0.375


To provide keyword arguments you let the argument have a default value by assigning a value to it:

>>> def name_and_favorite_food(name, favorite_food='pizza'):
...     return name + "'s favorite food is " + favorite_food + '.'
...
>>> name_and_favorite_food('Dominik')
"Dominik's favorite food is pizza."
>>> name_and_favorite_food('Stefan', 'kimchi')
"Stefan's favorite food is kimchi."


If you execute them in the interactive Python interpreter the value returned by a function is automatically displayed if you do not assign it to a variable. It is important to know that the return keyword is used to make the value accessible to the outer scope, that is outside of the function. See the following example, where we first do not have a return statement:

>>> def is_positive_without_return(x):
...     if x >= 0:
...         print(True)
...     else:
...         print(False)
...
>>> is_positive_without_return(1)
True
>>> is_positive_without_return(-1)
False
>>> a = is_positive_without_return(1)
True
>>> print(a)
None


As you can see the variable a has no value at all. If you want a to receive the result of the function you have to return it, not print it:

>>> def is_positive_without_return(x):
...     if x >= 0:
...         return True
...     else:
...         return False
...
>>> is_positive_without_return(1)
True
>>> is_positive_without_return(-1)
False
>>> a = is_positive_without_return(1)
>>> print(a)
True


## Functions as function arguments¶

You are able to pass almost anything to a function—even functions itself! This is especially useful if you want to do data fitting or root finding of mathematical functions.

def format_heading(text):
return '\n' + text + '\n' + '='*len(text) + '\n'

# Assume that sections is a list of dictionaries with the keys
# heading for the heading text and content for the content
# of the section.
# Assume that the header_formatter is a function that takes a string
# as argument and formats it in a way that is befitting for a heading.
text = ''
for section in sections:
content = section['content']
# Before returning it we make shure that all surrounding whitespace is
# gone.
return text.strip()

secs = [
{
'content': 'In this section we introduce some smart method to teach Python.'
},
{
'content': 'More than 42 % of participants in this study learned Python.'
}
]

print(pretty_text)


So as you can see the argument header_formatter is just treated as if it was a function. If you run this script the output will be:

Introduction
============
In this section we introduce some smart method to teach Python.

Results
=======
More than 42 % of participants in this study learned Python.


## Summary¶

• Functions can make your life easier by streamlining repeated tasks or giving a name to complex programming logic.
• Functions may have two different kinds of arguments, positional arguments that must be given to the function and keyword arguments which provide default values.
• Functions are defined using the def keyword.
• Functions may return values by using the return keyword.

## Exercises¶

Footnotes

 [1] Lambdas are the exception to the rule as they define anonymous functions.