Defining a function question!

Question

Hey! I’m currently learning how to define a function and had a question.

If I wanted to make a feet to inches function converter, would it look like this?

def feet_to_inches(feet):
inches = feet*12
return inches

Answer 1

That's right, spot on! And to call the function later on (in this case with 3 feet), just do this, and the number of inches should be equal to 36:

inches = feet_to_inches(3)

Answer 2

Looks good!

One thing that you can look into as well is to make sure that what is passed to the argument is a number and not a string or something else. If it’s anything other than a number the program will have an error and stop working. This requires some condition checks (if...).

Example:
feet_to_inches(3) #returns 36
feet_to_inches(‘three’) #error!

Answer 3

Awesome! Thanks guys!

I was having the hardest time last night when calling the function and getting a users input for the defined function.

I was using:

feet = input(“Enter number of feet :”)
print(feet_to_inches(feet))

And every time I entered a number, it would just repeat my input 12 times! I was getting so frustrated as to why it was doing this. Then I realized I needed to convert (feet) to an integer like this and it solved it!

print(feet_to_inches(int(feet)))