love it or hate itsignificant whitespace is fact of life for python programmersand in my experience it helps make python code lot more readable than other languages 've used while it may seem foreign at firsti suspect that it will grow on you after while strongly recommend that you use spaces to as your default indentation and that your editor replace tabs with spaces many text editors have setting that will replace tab stops with spaces automatically (do this!some people use tabs or different number of spaceswith spaces not being terribly uncommon spaces is by and large the standard adopted by the vast majority of python programmersso recommend doing that in the absence of compelling reason otherwise as you can see by nowpython statements also do not need to be terminated by semicolons semicolons can be usedhoweverto separate multiple statements on single linea putting multiple statements on one line is generally discouraged in python as it often makes code less readable everything is an object an important characteristic of the python language is the consistency of its object model every numberstringdata structurefunctionclassmoduleand so on exists in the python interpreter in its own "boxwhich is referred to as python object each object has an associated type (for examplestring or functionand internal data in practice this makes the language very flexibleas even functions can be treated just like any other object comments any text preceded by the hash mark (pound signis ignored by the python interpreter this is often used to add comments to code at times you may also want to exclude certain blocks of code without deleting them an easy solution is to comment out the coderesults [for line in file_handlekeep the empty lines for now if len(line= continue results append(line replace('foo''bar') appendixpython language essentials www it-ebooks info