sep='' in the context of a function call sets the named argument sep to an empty string. See the print() function; sep is the separator used between multiple values when printing. The default is a space (sep=' '), this function call makes sure that there is no space between Property tax: $ and the formatted tax floating point value.

Understanding the Context

Compare the output of the following three print() calls to ... sep is used when you pass a list of strings to be separated, you seem to be passing the strings one by one in a for loop. I'd either remove the for loop and just print value, or change it to end=',' If sep is None, will try to automatically determine this. Separators longer than 1 character and different from '\s+' will be interpreted as regular expressions, will force use of the python parsing engine and will ignore quotes in the data.

Key Insights

12 The print function uses sep to separate the arguments, and end after the last argument. Your example was confusing because you only gave it one argument. This example might be clearer: