Python invalid syntax on a string?

Question

I am very new to coding so I hope my question makes sense/is formatted correctly.

Here is my code:

#this function takes a name and a town, and returns it as the following:
#"Hello. My name is [name]. I love the weather in [town name]." 

def introduction("name","town"):
    phrase1='Hello. My name is '
    phrase2='I love the weather in '
    return ("phrase1" + "name" + "phrase2" + "town")

E.g. introduction("George","Washington") in the python shell would return as "Hello. My name is George. I love the weather in Washington."

My problem is that my code is not doing that. Instead I get the following error:

Invalid syntax: <string> on line 1". In Wing101 **,"town"):

has a red swiggle under it. I'm not sure what I did wrong...I know "name" and "town" are strings and not variables, but I really have no idea how to fix it.

Any help/comments are appreciated.

I suggest you do some basic research on how to define functions, such as by reading the relevant section in the official tutorial. — TigerhawkT3
– TigerhawkT3, Commented Jan 23, 2016 at 23:11
I suspect this got a lot of views over time because of the "clickbait" title - people could end up here, for example, because they were trying to use eval and there was a syntax error in the evaluated code. — Karl Knechtel
– Karl Knechtel, Commented Jun 24, 2024 at 17:46

Martijn Pieters · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-23 23:08:38Z

9

You can't use string literals as function arguments, no. You can only use variable names. Remove all the double quotes:

def introduction(name, town):
    phrase1='Hello. My name is '
    phrase2='. I love the weather in '
    return (phrase1 + name + phrase2 + town)

You pass in strings when calling the function:

introduction("George", "Washington")

and these then get assigned to name and town respectively.

answered Jan 23, 2016 at 23:08

Martijn Pieters

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