In previous posts, we have seen a couple a couple of examples of functions – print() being just one of them.

As you know, functions are ways for us to give an instruction to a program. Out of the box, Python has lots of them – and packages add even more. But there are many instances when we might want to create our own. They can save us repeating code, they can give us code that we share with other people or future programs that we will write.

Creating them is simple:

In [1]:

def doubleMe(number):
    return number*2
    
doubleMe(2)

Out[1]:

In just two lines, we have introduced a new function called ‘doubleMe’! Let’s break this down bit by bit:

The first line uses the keyword ‘def’ and a function name to tell Python that we are creating a new function. We then tell it what arguments it is going to need – any we gave this function one argument, called ‘number’. ‘Number’ is just a name, we could have called this anything, but it helps us to give a comprehensible name. Why make life more difficult?!

After the arguments list in brackets, add a colon and add the next lines after a tab space.

The second line (and in future functions, there will be more lines here!) gives instructions as to what to do with these arguments. In this example, we return the ‘number’, multiplied by 2!

Let’s create a function that creates a Tweet for our live text commentary:

In [2]:

def newTweet(player, action, success):
    tweet = player + " plays a " + action + "."
    if (success):
        if action == "pass":
            tweet += " The team keep possession"
        elif action == "shot":
            tweet += " GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLL"
    else:
        if action == "pass":
            tweet += " The pass is unsuccessful"
        elif action == "shot":
            tweet += " No goal this time!"
            
    return tweet
    
newTweet("Pearlo", "shot", True)

Out[2]:

'Pearlo plays a shot. GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLLL'

We have just created a program that creates tweets for us, based on three arguments – player, action and success.

It takes the first two arguments and creates the first sentence in the tweet. It then takes the True or False value in success to decide what to add to the end of the tweet with some nested if statements. Hopefully these are simple enough to follow along with!

The function finally returns the new tweet, which we can manually add to our feed. Did you know there is a Twitter package for Python that will allow you to post directly to Twitter?! A lesson for another day.

Summary

Here, we have seen how to define functions with the following structure:

def functionName(Arguments):

---do something with arguments---

This allows us to write reusable code that will make our programs smarter, tidier and sharable! They incorporate if statements, for loops and everything else that you have learned and will learn in Python.

In our example, we created a small function that creates tweets for us for a live text commentary, that save us typing out the same things repeatedly. It wasn’t particularly smart, but we’ll get there!

functions