Scribd
Upload
12 views6 pages

Week 4

The document covers string operations in Python, including comparisons, indexing, slicing, and methods. It explains how to use operators for equality and inequality, as well as how to check for substrings and the length of strings. Additionally, it introduces for loops for iterating over strings and demonstrates accumulator patterns for counting and collecting vowels.

Uploaded by

Anand Duraiswamy
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
12 views6 pages

Week 4

The document covers string operations in Python, including comparisons, indexing, slicing, and methods. It explains how to use operators for equality and inequality, as well as how to check for substrings and the length of strings. Additionally, it introduces for loops for iterating over strings and demonstrates accumulator patterns for counting and collecting vowels.

Uploaded by

Anand Duraiswamy
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 6

Lecture 1

More str Operators


String Comparisons

The equality and inequlity operators can be applied to strings:


>>> 'a' == 'a'
True
>>> 'ant' == 'ace'
False
>>> 'a' == 'b'
False
>>> 'a' != 'b'
True

We can compare two strings for their dictionary order, comparing them letter by
letter:
>>> 'abracadabra' < 'ace'
True
>>> 'abracadabra' > 'ace'
False
>>> 'a' <= 'a'
True
>>> 'A' < 'B'
True
Capitalization matters, and capital letters are less than lowercase letters:
>>> 'a' != 'A'
True
>>> 'a' < 'A'
False
Every letter can be compared:
>>> ',' < '3'
True
We can compare a string and an integer for equality:
>>> 's' == 3
False
We can't compare values of two different types for ordering:
>>> 's' <= 3
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>>
TypeError: unorderable types: str() <= int()

Testing For Substrings

The operator in checks whether a string appears anywhere inside another one (that
is, whether a string is a substring of another).
>>> 'c' in 'aeiou'
False
>>> 'cad' in 'abracadabra'
True
>>> 'zoo' in 'ooze'
False

String length: function len

The builtin function len returns the number of characters in a string:


>>> len('')
0
>>> len('abracadabra')
11
>>> len('Bwa' + 'ha' * 10)
23

Summary

Description Operator Example Result of example


equality == 'cat' == 'cat' True
inequality != 'cat' != 'Cat' True
less than < 'A' < 'a' True
greater than > 'a' > 'A' True
less than or equal <= 'a' <= 'a' True
greater than or equal >= 'a' >= 'A' True
contains in 'cad' in 'abracadabra' True
length of str s len(s) len("abc") 3

Lecture 2

str: indexing and slicing


Indexing

An index is a position within the string. Positive indices count from the left-hand
side with the first character at index 0, the second at index 1, and so on. Negative
indices count from the right-hand side with the last character at index -1, the
second last at index -2, and so on. For the string "Learn to Program", the indices
are:

The first character of the string is at index 0 and can be accessed using this bracket
notation:
>>> s[0]
'L'
>>> s[1]
'e'
Negative indices are used to count from the end (from the right-hand side):
>>> s[-1]
'm'
>>> s[-2]
'a'

Slicing

We can extract more than one character using slicing. A slice is a substring from
the start index up to but not including the end index. For example:
>>> s[0:5]
'Learn'
>>> s[6:8]
'to'
>>> s[9:16]
'Program'
More generally, the end of the string can be represented using its length:
>>> s[9:len(s)]
'Program'
The end index may be omitted entirely and the default is len(s):
>>> s[9:]
'Program'
Similarly, if the start index is omitted, the slice starts from index 0:
>>> s[:]
'Learn to Program'
>>> s[:8]
'Learn to'
Negative indices can be used for slicing too. The following three expressions are
equivalent:
>>> s[1:8]
'earn to'
>>> s[1:-8]
'earn to'
>>> s[-15:-8]
'earn to'

Modifying Strings

The slicing and indexing operations do not modify the string that they act on, so
the string that s refers to is unchanged by the operations above. In fact, we cannot
change a string. Operations like the following result in errors:
>>> s[6] = 'd'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File <"pyshell#19", line 1, in <module>
s[6] = 'd'
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
Imagine that we want to change string s to refer to 'Learned to Program'. The
following expression evaluates to that 'Learned to Program': s[:5] + 'ed' +
s[5:]

Variable s gets the new string: s = s[:5] + 'ed' + s[5:]

Notice that the string that s originally referred to was not modified: strings cannot
be modified. Instead a new string was created and s was changed to point to that
string.

LECTURE 2

str Methods: Functions Inside Objects


Methods

A method is a function inside of an object.

The general form of a method call is:


object.method(arguments)

String Methods

Consider the code:


>>> white_rabbit = "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!"
To find out which methods are inside strings, use the function dir:
>>> dir(white_rabbit)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__',
'__eq__', '__format__',
'__ge__', '__getattribute__','__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__gt__',
'__hash__', '__init__',
'__iter__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__',
'__new__', '__reduce__',
'__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__',
'__sizeof__', '__str__',
'__subclasshook__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'encode', 'endswith',
'expandtabs', 'find',
'format', 'format_map', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdecimal',
'isdigit', 'isidentifier',
'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper',
'join', 'ljust', 'lower',
'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust',
'rpartition', 'rsplit',
'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase',
'title', 'translate', 'upper',
'zfill']
Passing str as an argument to dir gets the same result:
>>> dir(str)
For many of the string methods, a new string is returned. Since strings are
immutable, the original string is unchanged. For example, a lowercase version of
the str that white_rabbit refers to is returned when the method lower is called:
>>> white_rabbit.lower()
>>> "i'm late! i'm late! for a very important date!"
>>> white_rabbit
>>> "I'm late! I'm late! For a very important date!"

To get information about a method, such as the lower method, do the following:
>>> help(str.lower)

LECTURE 3:

for loop over str


For Loops

The general form of a for loop over a string is:


for variable in str:
body

The variable refers to each character of the string in turn and executes the body of
the loop for each character. For example:
>>> s = 'yesterday'
>>> for char in s:
... print(char)
...
y
e
s
t
e
r
d
a
y

Accumulator pattern: numeric accumulator

Consider the code below, in which the variable num_vowels is an accumulator:


def count_vowels(s):
""" (str) -> int

Return the number of vowels in s. Do not treat letter y as a vowel

>>> count_vowels('Happy Anniversary!')


5
>>> count_vowels('xyz')
0
"""

num_vowels = 0

for char in s:
if char in 'aeiouAEIOU':
num_vowels = num_vowels + 1

return num_vowels

The loop in the function above will loop over each character that s refers to, in
turn. The body of the loop is executed for each character, and when a character is a
vowel, the if condition is True and the value that num_vowels refers to is increased
by one.

The variable num_vowels is an accumulator, because it accumulates information. It


starts out referring to the value 0 and by the end of the function it refers to the
number of vowels in s.

Accumulator pattern: string accumulator

In the following function, the variable vowels is also an accumulator:

def collect_vowels(s):
""" (str) -> str

Return the vowels from s. Do not treat the letter


y as a vowel.

>>> collect_vowels('Happy Anniversary!')


'aAiea'
>>> collect_vowels('xyz')
''
"""

vowels = ''

for char in s:
if char in 'aeiouAEIOU':
vowels = vowels + char

return vowels

Variable vowels initially refers to the empty string, but over the course of the
function it accumulates the vowels from s

You might also like