decimal decimal( decimal decimal(" "decimal(' 'although the division using decimal decimals is more accurate than the one involving floatsin this case (on -bit machinethe difference only shows up in the fifteenth decimal place in many situations this is insignificant--for examplein this bookall the examples that need floating-point numbers use floats one other point to note is that the last two of the preceding examples reveal for the first time that printing an object involves some behind-the-scenes formatting when we call print(on the result of decimal decimal( decimal decimal(" "the bare number is printed--this output is in string form if we simply enter the expression we get decimal decimal output--this output is in representational form all python objects have two output forms string form is designed to be human-readable representational form is designed to produce output that if fed to python interpreter would (when possiblereproduce the represented object we will return to this topic in the next section where we discuss stringsand again in when we discuss providing string and representational forms for our own custom data types the library reference' decimal module documentation provides all the details that are too obscure or beyond our scope to coverit also provides more examplesand faq list strings ||strings are represented by the immutable str data type which holds sequence of unicode characters the str data type can be called as function to create string objects--with no arguments it returns an empty stringwith nonstring argument it returns the string form of the argumentand with string argument it returns copy of the string the str(function can also be used as conversion functionin which case the first argument should be string or something convertable to stringwith up to two optional string arguments being passedone specifying the encoding to use and the other specifying how to handle encoding errors earlier we mentioned that string literals are created using quotesand that we are free to use single or double quotes providing we use the same at both ends in additionwe can use triple quoted string--this is python-speak for string that begins and ends with three quote characters (either three single quotes or three double quotesfor exampletext """ triple quoted string like this can include 'quotesand "quoteswithout formality we can also escape newlines so this particular string is actually only two lines long ""character encodings