I'm doing example 11 on Learn the Hard Way and I'm just curious of how to use an escape sequence for the height part. If I ask for how tall and someone types in 6'2" with the foot and inches as quotes how do I get something in there that will not show that backslash when running it? When you run it the raw input prints out like 6\'2". I've tried a few things and can't get nothing to work.
print "How tall are you?",
height = raw_input()
In this exercise you're asked to call the information you got from raw_input (the variable 'height' that now has a value '6'2"') and print it inside a sentence, by using %r.
There are different '%' types you can use, and %r will give you the kind of 'raw' representation of the string. Zed has asked you to figure out the difference between %r and %s and %d already, so you should be familiar with this. If not, read more here:
What's the difference between %r, %s and %d in python?
To answer your question, this should work without problem:
print "How tall are you?"
height = raw_input()
print "You are %s tall" % height
I think what you're observing is the representation of the string. Observe:
>>> height = raw_input()
6'2'' <-- my input
>>> height
"6'2''"
>>> print height
6'2''
When you just type height, it will display the representation of a string (i.e, if you were to assign that value to a string you'd get the same as the input). This can also be observed through the function repr():
>>> print repr(height)
"6'2''"
Or even!
>>> repr(height)
'"6\'2\'\'"'
So basically, when you don't call print, python is basically doing print repr(... for you.
More info at the python docs for the repr() function
The answer of your question is:
print "How old are you?",
age = raw_input()
print "How tall are you?",
height = raw_input()
print "How much do you weigh?",
weight = raw_input()
print "So, you're %r old, %s tall and %r heavy." % (age, height, weight)
%r gives you raw representation of data where %s gives you to insert(and potentially format) a string.
