Variable not defined even though it is

[CoderMerv]

Hi! Just started my coding journey and I am immediately running into an error. I am currently reading the book "Python Crash Course: A Hands-on, Project based Introduction to Programming" and am mimicking the examples on VSCode as I read along.

I am currently trying out this example from the book:

message = "hello world"
print(message)

Upon running this in VSCode, I keep getting this error:

Output:
>>> print(message)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'message' is not defined

What am I doing wrong?

[menator01]

Looks like you running python from a cmd line in shell and not the script itself.
either do python script.py or if in the interpreter do message = 'my message' then print(message)

[CoderMerv]

Looks like you running python from a cmd line in shell and not the script itself.
either do python script.py or if in the interpreter do message = 'my message' then print(message)

Thank you for this. I figured that I just needed to highlight the entire code, then press shift + enter to run it. Previously, I was only pressing shift + enter without highlighting any line of code. This was effectively running just the last line of code.

[Larz60+]

you should be able to right click code, select python, and run in terminal
first you need to (one time) press ctrl-P in code window and select interpreter to be used.