Consider an example where you would want to print the name, marks, and the age of the person:

print "Name", "Marks", "Age" 
print "John Doe", 80.67, "27" 
print "Bhaskar", 76.908, "27"
print "Mohit", 56.98, "25" 

The output will be as follows:

C:pydev>python hello.py
Name Marks Age
John Doe 80.67 27
Bhaskar 76.908 27
Mohit 56.98 25

You can see the output, but the output that is displayed is not formatted. Python allows you to set the formatted output. If you have done some coding in C language, then you should be familiar with %d, %f, %s. In order to represent an integer %d is used, %f is used for float, and %s is used for string. If you used %5d, it means 5 spaces. If you used %5.2f, it means 5 spaces and .2 means precision. The decimal part of the number or the precision is set to 2. Let's use the formatting on the preceding example:

print "Name Marks Age" 
print ( "%s %14.2f %11d" % ("John Doe", 80.67, 27)) 
print ( "%s %12.2f %11d" %("Bhaskar" ,76.901, 27))
print ( "%s %3.2f %11d" %("Mohit", 56.98, 25)) 

The output we get is as follows:

C:pydev>python hello.py
Name Marks Age
John Doe 80.67 27
Bhaskar 76.90 27
Mohit 56.98 25

The preceding output is much better than the previous one. You can see Marks 76.901 set to 76.90 automatically.