Adding more complexity
Within a function, we can do much more complicated processes and use this to minimize the number of lines of code that we are using. For example, if we want to count the number characters in a string, we could use the following code:
# The string we are trying to count letters in
string = 'Hello, you are learning python!'
#Create a count = 0 that we will update
count = 0
#Iterate through each letter in the string
for letter in string:
#update the count
count += 1
print(count)
Obviously we could have done this with a call of length(string) as well, but this is to showcase how much a function can reduce the code length.
So if we made this into a function that returns the length of the string, it only requires 1 line to call the function.
def count_letters(string):
#Create a count = 0 that we will update
count = 0
# Iterate through each letter in the string
for letter in string:
# update the counts each time
count += 1
# Return the count
return count
and then to use the functions we would just need to define our string and call the function on it:
def count_letters(string):
#Create a count = 0 that we will update
count = 0
# Iterate through each letter in the string
for letter in string:
# update the counts each time
count += 1
# Return the count
return count
# Define the string
string = 'Hello, you are learning python!'
# Call the function on the string
print(count_letters(string))
This may seem arbitrary right now, but as we get into more difficult programming, this will become very useful! In the next lecture we explore an example of a more difficult function that we will build together.