Strings in Python

Jerry Cain
CS 106AX
October 26, 2022
slides leveraged from those constructed by Eric Roberts
 Selecting Characters from a String
• A string is (still) an ordered collection of characters. The
character positions in a Python string are, as in most computer
languages, identified by an index beginning at 0.
• For example, if s is initialized as
s = "hello, world"
the characters in s are arranged like this:
h e l l o , w o r l d
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

• You can select an individual character using the syntax str[k],

where k is the index of the desired character. The expression
s[7]
returns the one-character string "w" that appears at index 7.
 Negative Indexing
• Unlike JavaScript, Python allows you to specify a character
position in a string by using negative index numbers, which
count backwards from the end of the string. The characters in
the "hello, world" string on the previous slide can therefore
be numbered using the following indices:
h e l l o , w o r l d
–12 –11 –10 –9 –8 –7 –6 –5 –4 –3 –2 –1

• You can select the "w" toward the end of this string using the
expression
s[-5]

which is shorthand for the positive indexing expression

s[len(s) - 5]
 Concatenation
• One of the more familiar operations available to Python
strings is concatenation, which consists of combining two
strings end to end with no intervening characters.
• Concatenation is built into Python in the form of the +
operator. This is consistent with how JavaScript (and Java,
and C++) supports concatenation.
• Noteworthy difference between Python and JavaScript:
Python interprets the + operator as concatenation only if both
operands are strings. If one of the operands is something
other than a string, then string concatenation isn’t applied.
• Restated, Python doesn’t automatically convert numbers to
strings as JavaScript does.
 Repetition
• In much the same way that Python redefines the + operator to
indicate string concatenation, it also redefines the * operator
for strings to indicate repetition, so that the expression s * n
indicates n copies of the string s concatenated together.
• The expression "la" * 3 therefore returns "lalala", which is
three copies of the string "la" concatenated together.
• Note that this interpretation is consistent with the idea that
multiplication is repeated addition:
"la" * 3 ® "la" + "la" + "la"

• You can use this feature, for example, to print a line of 72

hyphens like this:
print("-" * 72)
 Exercise: String Repetition
• Use string repetition to encode the following songs in as short
a Python program as possible:
Let it be I can feel your halo halo halo
Let it be I can see your halo halo halo
Let it be I can feel your halo halo halo
Let it be I can see your halo halo halo
Whisper words of wisdom
Let it be
—Paul McCartney, "Let it Be", 1970 —Beyoncé, "Halo”, 2008

• In 1984, computer Don Knuth published a paper on "The

Complexity of Songs" in which he concludes that Casey and
the Sunshine Band holds the record for longest song lyric.
u = " uh huh" * 2
s = ("That's the way" + u + " I like it" + u + "\n") * ∞
 Exercise: removeDoubledLetters
• In the early part of the 20th century, there was considerable
interest in both England and the United States in simplifying
the rules used for spelling English words, which has always
been a difficult proposition. One suggestion advanced as part
of this movement was to eliminate all doubled letters, so that
bookkeeper would be written as bokeper and committee
would become comite. Write a function
removeDoubledLetters(s)

that returns a new string in which any duplicated characters in

s have been replaced by a single copy.
 Slicing
• Python allows you to extract a substring by specifying a range
of index positions inside the square brackets. This operation
is known as slicing.
• The simplest specification of a slice is [start:limit], where
start is the index position at which the slice begins, and limit
is the index position before which the slice ends.
• The start and limit components of a slice are optional, but the
colon must be present. If start is missing, it defaults to 0; if
limit is missing, it defaults to the length of the string.
• A slice specification may also contain a third component
called a stride, as with [start:limit:stride]. Strides indicate
how many positions are omitted between selected characters.
• The stride component can be negative, in which case the
selection occurs backwards from the end of the string.
 Exercise: Slicing
• Suppose that you have initialized ALPHABET as
ALPHABET = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
so that the index numbers (in both directions) run like this:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
–26 –25 –24 –23 –22 –21 –20 –19 –18 –17 –16 –15 –14 –13 –12 –11 –10 –9 –8 –7 –6 –5 –4 –3 –2 –1

• What are the values of the following slice expressions?

(a) ALPHABET[7:9] (f) ALPHABET[1:-1]
(b) ALPHABET[-3:-1] (g) ALPHABET[0:5:2]
(c) ALPHABET[:3] (h) ALPHABET[::-1]
(d) ALPHABET[-1:] (i) ALPHABET[5:2:-1]
(e) ALPHABET[14:-12] (j) ALPHABET[14:10:-2]
 Methods for Finding Patterns
str.find(pattern)
Returns the first index of pattern in str, or -1 if it does not appear.
str.find(pattern, k)
Same as the one-argument version but starts searching from index k.
str.rfind(pattern)
Returns the last index of pattern in str, or -1 if it does not appear.
str.rfind(pattern, k)
Same as the one-argument version but searches backward from index k.
str.startswith(prefix)
Returns True if this string starts with prefix.
str.endswith(suffix)
Returns True if this string ends with suffix.
 Methods for Transforming Strings
str.lower()
Returns a copy of str with all letters converted to lowercase.
str.upper()
Returns a copy of str with all letters converted to uppercase.
str.capitalize()
Capitalizes the first character in str and converts the rest to lowercase.
str.strip()
Removes whitespace characters from both ends of str.
str.replace(old, new)
Returns a copy of str with all instances of old replaced by new.
 Methods for Classifying Characters
ch.isalpha()
Returns True if ch is a letter.
ch.isdigit()
Returns True if ch is a digit.
ch.isalnum()
Returns True if ch is a letter or a digit.
ch.islower()
Returns True if ch is a lowercase letter.
ch.isupper()
Returns True if ch is an uppercase letter.
ch.isspace()
Returns True if ch is a whitespace character (space, tab, or newline).
str.isidentifier()
Returns True if this string is a legal Python identifier.
 Revisiting Pig Latin in Python

"isthay"
"isway"
"igpay"

"atinlay"

line word
result vp head start tail
word i chi ch
"this is pig latin" "latin"
"this"
"pig"
"is"
"isthay
"isthay
"isthay
"isthay
"isthay
isway
"isthay 2"
0
1
"isthay"
isway
isway
""igpay
isway
isway"" " "th"
igpay
igpay" "p" 12
"l"
atinlay" 0 "this"
-1
5
8 0 "atin"
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9 "is""n"
"ig""h"
"s"
"p"
"g"
"
"l"
"a"
"t"
"i""1
0"t"
2

>>> toPigLatin("this is pig latin")

isthay isway igpay atinlay
 Exercise: Implement translate
Pig Latin is just one example of a language game designed to
render spoken words to be incomprehensible to the untrained
ear. B-Language is another such language game—known
primarily in Germany—where words are transformed such that
every vowel cluster is reduplicated with a leading "b".
Implement of translate, which accepts a lowercase (English)
word and returns its B-Language translation.
Examples:
translate("quick") Þ "quibuick"
translate("spaghetti") Þ "spabaghebettibi"
translate("adieu") Þ "abadieubieu"
translate("audiophile") Þ "aubaudiobiophibilebe"
translate("queueing") Þ "queueibueueing"
 Exercise: Implement extract
Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, are string expressions
used to identify where documents can be found on the Internet.
Many URLs include query strings, which are substrings
appearing after a "?" that further refine what portion of a
document should be retrieved. For example:
https://www.google.edu/search?q=hello&tbm=vid
lists public videos associated with "hello" , which
unsurprisingly includes a whole lot of Adele.
 Exercise: Implement extract
Query strings are really just string serializations of maps in the
sense you learned about JavaScript aggregates, where keys are
separated from values by equal signs, and key-value pairs are
separated from one another by ampersands.

Implement extract, which lists all key value pairs, one per line,
embedded within the query string of a URL. For example:
extract("https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&"\
"academicYear=&page=0&q=CS&filter-departmentcode-CS=on&"\
"filter-coursestatus-Active=on&filter-term-Winter=on")

would print the following in the Terminal

Key: "view", Value: "catalog"
Key: "academicYear", Value: ""
Key: "page", Value: "0"
Key: "q", Value: "CS"
Key: "filter-departmentcode-CS", Value: "on"
Key: "filter-coursestatus-Active", Value: "on"
Key: "filter-term-Winter", Value: "on"
The End