TASK

The String Data Type

Introduction
WELCOME TO THE STRING DATA TYPE TASK!
Strings are some of the most important and useful data types in programming.
Why? Let’s think about it like this. When you were born, your parents did not
immediately teach you to do mathematical sums, not 1 + 1 or standard deviation.
The first thing they taught you to do was to speak, to say words, to construct full
sentences, to say “Mom” or “Dad”. Well this is why we are going to ‘teach’ the
computer to first be able to communicate with the user — and the only way to do
this is to have a good grasp of strings.

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reviewer to get support on any aspect of your course.

The best way to get help is to login to Discord at https://discord.com/invite/hyperdev

where our specialist team is ready to support you.

Our team is happy to offer you support that is tailored to your individual career or
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WHAT ARE STRINGS?

A string is a list of letters, numerals, symbols and special characters that are put
together. The values that we can store in a string are vast. An example of what
strings can store is the surname, name, address, etc. of a person.

In Python, strings must be written within “quotation marks” for the computer to be
able to read it.

The smallest possible string contains zero characters and is called an empty string
(i.e. string = “”).

Examples of strings:

name = "Linda"

song = "The Bird Song",

licence_plate = "CTA 456 GP"

Strings are probably the most important data type in programming. They are used
as a medium of communication between the computer and the user. The user can
enter information as a string and the program can use the data to perform
calculations and finally display the calculated answer to the user.

name = "John"
joke = "Knock, knock, Who's there?"

You can use any name for your variable but the actual string you are assigning to
the variable must be within “ “ (quotation marks).

Defining Multi-Line Strings:

Sometimes, it's useful to have long strings that can go over one line. We use triple
single quotes ( “”” “””) to define a multi-line string. Defining a multi-line string
preserves the formatting of the string.

For example:
long_string = ''' This is a long string
using triple quotes preserves everything inside it as a string
even on different lines and with different \n spacing. '''
STRING FORMATTING

Strings can be added to one another. In the past we used to use a method called
concatenation, which looked like this:

name = "Peter"
surname = "Parker"
full_name = name + surname

full_name will now store the value “PeterParker”.

The + symbol simply joins the strings. If you wanted it to make your code more
presentable, you could put spaces between the words.

full_name = name + " " + surname

We now added a blank space in between the two strings, so full_name will now
store the value “Peter Parker”. Now, you cannot concatenate a string and a
non-string. You need to cast the non-string to a string if you want to concatenate
it with another string value. If you try to run code that adds a string and a
non-string, you will get an error. For example, if we wanted to add an age of 32 we
would have to cast it as a string to print it.

print(full_name + str(32))

But this is a clunky way of formatting strings. This way of putting together a
string is still done in older languages, such as Java, and does have its place, but it is
much better practice to use the format() method.

name = "Peter Parker"

age = 32
sentence = "My name is {} and I'm {} years old.".format(name, age)
print(sentence)

In the example above, a set of opening and closing curly braces ({}) serve as a
placeholder for variables. The variables that will be put into those placeholders are
listed in the brackets after the keyword format. The variables will fill in the
placeholders in the order in which they are listed. Therefore, the code above will
result in the following output: My name is Peter Parker and I'm 32 years old.

Notice that you don’t have to cast a variable that contains a number (age) to a
string when you use the format method.
f-Strings

The shorthand for the format function is f-strings. Take a look at the example
below:

name = "Peter Parker"

age = 32
sentence = f"My name is {name} and I'm {age} years old."
print(sentence)

In f-strings, instead of writing .format() with the variables at the end, we write an f
before the string and put the variable names within the curly brackets. This is a
neat and concise way of formatting strings.

NUMBERS AS STRINGS

We can even store numbers as strings. When we are storing a number ( i.e. 9, 10,
231) as a string, we are essentially storing it as a word. The number will lose all its
number-defining characteristics. So the number will not be able to be used in any
calculations. All you can do with it is read or display it.

In real-life sometimes we don’t need numbers to do calculations, we just need

them for information purposes. For example, the house number you live in (let’s
say, 45 2nd Street JHB 2093) won’t be used for performing any calculations. What
benefit would there be for us to find out what the sum is of all the house numbers
in an area? The only thing we need is to know what number the house is when
visiting or delivering a package. The number just needs to be visible. This is the
same concept when storing a number as a string; all we want is to be able to take
in a value and display it to the user.

Example:
telephone_num = "041 1231234"

THINGS YOU CAN DO TO STRINGS

A string is essentially a list of characters. For example, the word “Hello” is made up
of the characters H+e+l+l+o. We can use this to our advantage to access the exact
character we need using indexing.
 ' H e l l o w o r l d ! '
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Each character of a string (including blank spaces) is indexed by numbers starting

from 0 for the first character on the left.

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[0] + greeting[1] + greeting[2] + greeting[3] + greeting[4])

Output:
Hello

You can use len() to get the number of characters in a string or length of a string.
The print statement below prints out 12, because "Hello world!" is 12 characters
long, including punctuation and spaces.

print(len("Hello World!"))

Output:
12

You can also slice a string. Slicing in Python extracts characters from a string, based
on a starting index and ending index. It enables you to extract more than one
character or "chunk" of characters from a string. The print statement below will
print out a piece of the string. It will start at position/index 1, and end at
position/index 4 (which is not included).

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[1:4])

Output:

ell

You can even put negative numbers inside the brackets. The characters are also
indexed from right to left using negative numbers, where -1 is the rightmost index
and so on. Using negative indices is an easy way of starting at the end of the string
instead of the beginning. This way, -3 means "3rd character from the end".
Look at the example below. The string is printed from the first index, ‘e’, all the way
to the end of the string. Notice that you do not need to specify the end of the index
range:

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[1:])

Output:

ello

In the example below, the slice begins from position 0 and goes up to but not
including position 1:

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[:1])

Output:

In the next example, the slice begins from position 1, includes positions 1 and 2, and
then continues to the end of the string and skips/steps over every other position.
This is known as an extended slice. The syntax for an extended slice is [begin : end :
step]. If the end is left out, the slice continues to the end of the string.

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[1::2])

Output:

el

In this final example, you can think of the ‘-1’ as a reverse order argument. The slice
begins from position 4, continues to position 1 (not included) and skips/steps
backwards one position at a time:

greeting = "Hello"
print(greeting[4:1:-1])
Output:

oll

You can print a string in reverse by using [::-1]. Remember that the syntax for an
extended slice is [begin : end : step]. By not including a beginning and end and
specifying a step of -1, the slice will cover the entire string, backwards, so the string
will be reversed. You can find out more about extended slices here.

Note that slicing a string does not modify the original string. You can capture a
slice from one variable in a separate variable. Try typing the following into the
interactive shell:

new_string = "Hello world!"

fizz = new_string[0:5]
print(fizz)
print(new_string)

By slicing and storing the resulting substring in another variable, you can have
both the whole string and the substring handy for quick, easy access.

STRING HANDLING

There are various functions in Python that we can use to manipulate strings.
Functions are used to save us from having to write monotonous code over and
over. They have built-in code that is stored in Python.

Here are a few examples of useful string functions:

● The upper() and lower() functions make a new string with all letters
converted to uppercase and lowercase, respectively.

a_string = "Hello World"

print(a_string.upper()) # prints out HELLO WORLD

print(a_string.lower()) # prints out hello world

● The replace() function will replace any occurrence of a string with a string of
your choice. In the example below, every $ character in the string stored in
the variable a_sentence will be replaced with a space character.

a_sentence = "Welcome$to$the$world$of$programming"
 print(a_sentence.replace("$" , " ")) # prints out Welcome to the world
of programming

● The strip() function is used to remove a certain character from the start and
end of a string value. In the example below, the strip() function will remove
all the * characters from the start and end of the string value stored in the
variable named str_help.

str_help = "******Please leave me alone******"

print(str_help.strip('*')) # prints out Please leave me alone

Most programming languages provide built-in functions to manipulate strings, i.e.,

you can concatenate strings, you can search from a string, you can extract
substrings from a string, etc. We will cover string handling and more functions in a
future task.

ESCAPE CHARACTER

Python uses the backslash (\) as an escape character. The backslash (\) is used as a
marker character to tell the compiler/interpreter that the next character has some
special meaning. The backslash, together with certain other characters, is known as
an ‘escape sequence’.

Some useful escape sequences are listed below:

● \n - Newline
● \t - Tab
● \s - Space
The escape character can also be used if you need to include quotation marks
within a string. You can put a backslash (\) in front of a quotation mark so that it
doesn’t terminate the string. You can also put a backslash in front of another
backslash if you need to include a backslash in a string.
Hey again, Have you heard about a Raspberry Pi before? No, it’s not a new dessert, let me
explain.

WHAT IS A RASPBERRY PI?

The Raspberry Pi is a computer that is so small it can fit in your pocket. You can plug it into
your TV and connect a keyboard to it and you will have a fully setup personal computer.
Don’t be so quick to judge it just because of its size. It can be used for electronics projects,
and for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word processing,
browsing the internet, and playing games. It also plays high-definition video.

Imagine all that power and it is only as big as a credit card. This is the newest outlet for
where your programs can be run on. It is always useful to know what new developments
in technology are happening so that you don’t fall behind.

A Raspberry Pi is relatively cheap to buy here in South Africa. If you want to learn more
about it you can visit: https://www.raspberrypi.org/
Instructions
Before you get started, we strongly suggest you start using an editor such as VS
Code or Anaconda to open all text files (.txt) and Python files (.py).

First, read example.py, open it using an editor of your choice (VS Code, Anaconda).

● example.py should help you understand some simple Python. Every task
will have example code to help you get started. Make sure you read all of
example.py and try your best to understand.

● You may run example.py to see the output. Feel free to write and run your
own example code before doing the Task to become more comfortable with
Python.

Compulsory Task 1

Follow these steps:

● Create a new Python file in this folder called strings.py

● Declare a variable called hero that contains the value “Superman”
● Print it out in the following way using two string manipulation methods
(split() and join()):
○ S^U^P^E^R M^A^N
Compulsory Task 2

Follow these steps:

● Create a new Python file in this folder called replace.py.

● Save the sentence: “The!quick!brown!fox!jumps!over!the!lazy!dog!.” as a
single string.
● Now reprint this sentence as “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy
dog.” using the replace() function to replace every “!” exclamation mark
with a blank space.
● Now reprint that sentence as “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE
LAZY DOG.” using the upper() function
● Print the sentence in reverse.

Compulsory Task 3

Follow these steps:

● Create a new Python file in this folder called manipulation.py.

● Ask the user to enter a sentence using the input() method. Save the user’s
response in a variable called str_manip.
● Using this string value, write the code to do the following:
○ Calculate and display the length of str_manip.
○ Find the last letter in str_manip. Replace every occurence of this
letter in str_manip with ‘@’. E.g. if str_manip = “This is a bunch of
words”, the output would be “Thi@ i@ a bunch of word@”
○ Print the last 3 characters in str_manip backwards. E.g. if str_manip
= “This is a bunch of words”, the output would be “sdr”.
○ Create a five-letter word that is made up of the first three characters
and the last two characters in str_manip. E.g. if str_manip = “This is a
bunch of words”, the output would be “Thids”.
○ Display each word on a new line.
If you are having any difficulties, please feel free to contact our specialist team on
Discord for support.

Optional Bonus Task

Let's practice some casting. Follow these steps:

● Create a new file called optional_task.py.

● Write Python code to take the name of a user's favourite restaurant and
store it in a variable called fav_rest.
● Now, below this, write a statement to take in the user's favourite number.
Use casting to store it in an integer variable called int_fav.
● Now print out both of these using two separate print statements below
what you have written. Be careful!
● Once this is working, try cast fav_rest to an integer. What happens? Add a
comment in your code to explain why this is.

Thing(s) to look out for:

1. Make sure that you have installed and setup all programs correctly. You have
setup Dropbox correctly if you are reading this, but Python or your editor may
not be installed correctly.
2. If you are not using Windows, please ask an expert code reviewer for alternative
instructions.
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