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Python Week2 Lecture2 Handout

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20 views

Python Week2 Lecture2 Handout

Uploaded by

s78210625
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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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

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