Python language basics 15: string basics part 2

Introduction

In the previous post we saw how strings are represented and constructed in Python. We also mentioned other important terms such as string concatenation, immutability and character escaping.

In this post we’ll look at a couple of other important things regarding strings. Bear in mind that Python offers a very large library regarding strings. It could take the rest of the year to blog about all of it. Here we’ll only discuss a handful. Here are a couple of useful links to help you further:

• TutorialsPoint python strings
• Pythons own documentation of string operations
• LearnPython’s string exercise page

The string constructor

We saw an example of the string constructor str() in this post. Here’s a reminder of the code:

print('Congratulations. It took you ' + str(guessCounter) + ' guesses to guess the correct number.')

guessCounter was an integer and it had to be converted into a string to fit the string concatenation. You can pass in any argument to the str() string constructor and you’ll get the string representation of that argument:

myIntegerString = str(132)
myBooleanString = str(True)

myIntegerString will evaluate to “132” and myBooleanString to “True”.

Extracting individual characters

We haven’t talked about arrays and collections yet but strings are in effect collections of characters. The string “hello” is made up of 5 characters. What if you want to check the value of the 3rd character in a string? It’s easy using the square-bracket operator []. You can pass in an integer to those brackets which denotes the position of the character you’d like to extract as follows:

hello = "hello"
first = hello[1]

That’s how you extract the first character of a string, right? If you’re new to programming then it seems logical that 1 should denote the first element. However, collections are 0 based in Python and probably all remotely popular programming languages out there. The variable “first” will actually get the value “e”. So if you truly want to extract the first character then you’ll need to pass in 0 as the enumerator:

hello = "hello"
first = hello[0]

String functions

There’s a myriad of built-in functions available for string types in Python. The above links will provide you with some good examples. Let’s just look at 2 of them here.

Say you’d like to capitalise all characters of a string, i.e. convert “hello” to “HELLO”. Easy, the function called “upper” helps:

hello = "hello"
helloCap = hello.upper()

Note how the function was called using the dot ‘.’ notation: string.function. That is the norm in object oriented languages. The object function is called using the dot.

The startswith method will return a boolean, i.e. True or False, indicating whether the string starts with the character that was passed in:

hello = "hello"
helloStartsWithH = hello.startswith("h")

helloStartsWithH will be True. However, the following will yield false:

helloStartsWithH = hello.startswith("H")

This means that this is a case-sensitive comparison. In general strings are case-sensitive in most programming languages, i.e. “hello” is not the same as “Hello” or “helLo”.

We’ll look at arrays in the next post.

Read all Python-related posts on this blog here.