Text

After input(), then Python waits for the user to enter input and press Enter, or to cancel with Ctrl+D.

On macOS and Linux, this seems to use the readline shell command internally.

Help

From help(input):

Help on built-in function input in module builtins:

input(prompt=None, /)
    Read a string from standard input.  The trailing newline is stripped.
    
    The prompt string, if given, is printed to standard output without a
    trailing newline before reading input.
    
    If the user hits EOF (*nix: Ctrl-D, Windows: Ctrl-Z+Return), raise EOFError.
    On *nix systems, readline is used if available.

Examples

Example in the console:

>> answer = input()
Hello, World

>>> answer
'Hello, World'

Or as a script:

answer = input()
print(answer)

Example with a prompt. Note the space after the prompt text.

>>> answer = input("What is your age? ")
What is your age? 31
>>> answer
"31"
>>> int(answer)
31

Put the question and answer on different lines using \n and tell the user to enter input with > symbol.

>>> input("What is your age?\n> ")
What is your age? 
> 31
'31'

Here is a REPL. It runs in a loop, handling user input and printing repeatedly.

print("Square tool")

while True:
  answer = input("Enter a number:\n> ")
  squared = int(answer) ** 2
  print(f"Squared: {squared}\n")

Running it:

$ python3 app.py
Enter a number:
> 2
Squared: 4

Enter a number:
> 4
Squared: 16

Deprecation note

Note that previously there was both and input and raw_input. Using input would evaluate input as Python code using something like eval internally. This turned for example numeric input from a string to an integer.

Now there is just input. This is safe and will not run an evaluation as Python code.

Get password

Get the user to enter a password in the console.

The characters will be masked as invisible.

Usage

getpass.getpass()

getpass.getpass(prompt=CUSTOM_PROMPT, stream=OUTPUT_STREAM)

e.g.

import getpass

pword = getpass.getpass() 
# Password: 

pword
# 'my password'

In Unix, this uses this function:

>>> help(getpass.getpass)
unix_getpass(prompt='Password: ', stream=None)
    Prompt for a password, with echo turned off.
    
    Args:
      prompt: Written on stream to ask for the input.  Default: 'Password: '
      stream: A writable file object to display the prompt.  Defaults to
              the tty.  If no tty is available defaults to sys.stderr.
    ...

Examples

import getpass 
  
  
try: 
    p = getpass.getpass() 
except Exception as error: 
    print('ERROR', error) 
else: 
    print('Password entered:', p)

Run it.

$ python3 app.py
Password: ****
Password entered: abcd