NPTEL MOOC
PROGRAMMING,
DATA STRUCTURES AND
ALGORITHMS IN PYTHON
Week 2, Lecture 2
Madhavan Mukund, Chennai Mathematical Institute
http://www.cmi.ac.in/~madhavan
Names, values and types
Values have types
Determine what operations are allowed
Names inherit type from currently assigned value
Can assign values of different types to a name
int, float, bool
+,-,*,/,.. and,or,.. ==,!=,>,..
Manipulating text
Computation is a lot more than number crunching
Text processing is increasingly important
Document preparation
Importing/exporting spreadsheet data
Matching search queries to content
Strings —type str
Type string, str, a sequence of characters
A single character is a string of length 1
No separate type char
Enclose in quotes—single, double, even triple!
city = 'Chennai'
title = "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
dialogue = '''He said his favourite book is
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”'''
Strings as sequences
String: sequence or list of characters
Positions 0,1,2,…,n-1 for a string of length n
0 1 2 3 4
s = "hello" h e l l o
-5 -4 -3 -2 -1
Positions -1,-2,… count backwards from end
s[1] == "e", s[-2] = "l"
Operations on strings
Combine two strings: concatenation, operator +
s = "hello"
t = s + ", there"
t is now "hello, there"
len(s) returns length of s
Will see other functions to manipulate strings later
Extracting substrings
A slice is a “segment” of a string
s = "hello"
s[1:4] is “ell"
s[i:j] starts at s[i] and ends at s[j-1]
s[:j] starts at s[0], so s[0:j]
s[i:] ends at s[len(s)-1], so s[i:len(s)]
Modifying strings
Cannot update a string “in place”
s = "hello", want to change to "help!"
s[3] = "p" — error!
Instead, use slices and concatenation
s = s[0:3] + "p!"
Strings are immutable values (more later)
Summary
Text values — type str, sequence of characters
Single character is string of length 1
Extract individual characters by position
Slices extract substrings
+ glues strings together
Cannot update strings directly — immutable
