Formatting using format() method in Python - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Formatting using format() method

📖 Scenario: You are preparing a simple report card for students. You want to display their names and scores neatly aligned in columns.

🎯 Goal: Build a program that formats and aligns student names and scores using the format() method.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with student names and their scores

Create a variable for the width of the name column

Use a for loop to format each student's name and score using the format() method

Print the formatted output

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Formatting text output is useful for creating readable reports, invoices, or tables in console applications.

💼 Career

Many jobs require displaying data clearly. Knowing how to format strings helps in data presentation and user interfaces.

1

Create the student scores dictionary

Create a dictionary called students with these exact entries: 'Alice': 85, 'Bob': 92, 'Charlie': 78

Python

# Create the students dictionary with names and scores
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create the dictionary and separate entries with commas.

2

Set the width for the name column

Create a variable called name_width and set it to 10 to define the width for the name column

Python

students = {'Alice': 85, 'Bob': 92, 'Charlie': 78}
# Set the width for the name column
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 10 to the variable name_width.

3

Format each student's name and score

Use a for loop with variables name and score to iterate over students.items(). Inside the loop, create a variable line that formats name left-aligned in a field of width name_width and score right-aligned in a field of width 3 using the format() method

Python

students = {'Alice': 85, 'Bob': 92, 'Charlie': 78}
name_width = 10
# Use a for loop to format each student's name and score
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use {:<{width}} to left-align the name and {:>3} to right-align the score.

4

Print the formatted lines

Inside the for loop, add a print(line) statement to display each formatted student name and score

Python

students = {'Alice': 85, 'Bob': 92, 'Charlie': 78}
name_width = 10
for name, score in students.items():
    line = "{:3}".format(name, score, width=name_width)
    # Print the formatted line
    # Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(line) inside the loop to show each formatted line.