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What is the scope in python?

Hey everyone TheCodingProject is back with the answer to another question from the world of Python and this time it’s about the “scope” in python code.
In Python the scope is indeed decided by the number of indents. It must be 4 spaces. In Python every object always has a local scope and the scope is always decided by the indent of that particular block within which the object is defined. Let's consider an example
  1. def foo ():
  2. var = 'abc'
  3. return var
In the above example, the scope of the variable var is limited to the function foo and how is the scope of the variable var is defined? It's defined by the indent that it maintains I.e. by making the indentation such that it comes under the function definition of foo, which tells the Python interpreter that the variable var is within the local scope of function foo. Now if you do the following -
  1. def foo():
  2.   var = 'abc'
  3. return var
  5. var = 'xyz'
  6. print (var)
  7. print(foo())
The output should be like the following-
  1. xyz
  2. abc
Why do you think the value of var was as such? The reason was again teh local scope of variable var. Notice that when the variable var was having a value ‘xyz' then the indent of the variable was same as the function definition of foo so the scope of variable didn't fall under the function definition. So, when we say print(var) then the current value of var was printed I.e. ‘xyz'. In the second print statement when the function foo was called then the value of variable var that was defined inside foo was printed since the instance of var having value ‘abc' was defined inside the indentation of function foo.
Now when we give only 1 space before the variable var inside foo-
  1. def foo():
  2. var = 'abc'
  3. return var
When you try to call the above function the interpreter will throw an error since we have defined only a single space before the variable var.
So, you see in Python the scope is decided by the indentation and the indent is 4 spaces and this is how the interpreter understands that which scope is to be used and under which block of code.
So, folks this was all for this week but more stuffs are coming your way next week, til then happy coding.


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