Is there a shorter way to get user input in python?

Question

This is not a challenge. I'm wondering if it's at all possible to get user input into two separate variables in python (2 or 3) with less than 19 bytes. These are all the shortest I can get:

a,b=input(),input()
a=input();b=input() (newline replaced with semicolon for readability)
i=input;a,b=i(),i()

Is there any shorter way to do this?

Answer 1

If prompting the user doesn't matter, this is slightly shorter than eval for 3 or more:

a,b,c=map(input,[1]*3)
a,b,c=map(input,'111')

It's also shorter even if prompting is not ok:

a,b,c=map(input,['']*3)

Sadly, xnor's idea doesn't save anything for 2 inputs as it is still longer (19 bytes). However if you have some string (or appropriate iterable) with the appropriate length already (because magic?) then it could be shorter.

xnor found an example of a magic string for 3 inputs in Python 2 only:

a,b,c=map(input,`.5`)

This also requires that the prompts not be important, though.

This trick actually helps to save bytes for large numbers of inputs by using 1eX notation (getting x+3 inputs):

 a,b,c,d,e,f=map(input,`1e3`)

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Explanation:

Python's map function performs the function it is passed on each element of the iterable that is also passed to it, and returns the list (or map object) containing the results of these calls. For the first example, the map could be decomposed to:

[input(1), input(1), input(1)]

Answer 2

For 3 or more inputs, this is shorter:

a,b,c=eval("input(),"*3)

Answer 3

Note that unless the question specifies the input type or requires a complete program, you can take input as function arguments, cutting out the need for input(). Where this is not an option, the following may help in certain cases.

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If you want single characters in the variables a and b, you can use

a,b=input()

Entering a 2 character string will then result in the first character being assigned to a and the second character being assigned to b. (Less than 2 or more than 2 characters in the string will give an error.)

If you require more than a single character per variable then this approach will not work. This could still be used to enter 2 single digit numbers as a string. If numbers beyond 9 are required then the full range of potential input characters could be interpreted as numbers.

Note that this also works for more than 2 variables:

a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h=input()

This works because in Python a string is a sequence of characters, and can be used anywhere a sequence is expected.