Chapter 7: Strings

Outline

• String as a sequence
• Indexing
• Mutability and Immutability
• Searching
• String Comparison

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What is a String?
• a string, the most popular data type in python, is a sequence of characters
enclosed within single quotes, or double quotes or triple single quotes or
triple double quotes; and can easily be created as such
• When a string contains numbers, it is still a string
• Strings are immutable, meaning once a string is created, it cannot be
changed.
• Python provides a wide range of operations and methods for working with
strings.

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Creating strings
• # Single and double quotes
string1 = 'Hello, World!'
string2 = "Hello, World!"
• # Triple quotes for multi-line strings
string3 = '''Hello,
World!'''
string4 = """Hello,
World!""“
What will print statement on each string output?
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Traversing
• Computations on string start at the beginning, select each character
in turn, do something to it, and continue until the end.
• This pattern of processing is called a traversal.
• The iteration variable, letter “iterates” though the string and the
block (body) of code is executed once for each value the iteration
variable assumes in the sequence
• Traversal for loop:
for letter in 'banana' :
print(letter) b a n a n a
• What will be the output?
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Looking inside
• We can get at any single character in a string using an index specified in square brackets
>>> fruit = 'banana‘
>>> print(fruit[1]) # prints what?
Indexing operator
• The expression in brackets is called an index
• The index value must be an integer and starts at zero
• And the largest index is length – 1, where length=len(string at hand)
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> letter = fruit[0]
>>> print(letter) # print b
>>> length = len(fruit)
>>> w = fruit[length - 1]
>>>print(w) #prints a
>>> print(fruit[-1]) # what will be printed?
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Indexing
▪ The first character of a string has index 0, thus the indexing could be 0, 1, 2, …
length-1, where length is the length of the string
>>> greeting = 'hello world'
>>> greeting[0]
'h'
>>> 'hello world'[0]
'h'
▪ You can also count back from the end of a string, beginning with -1; the indexing
becomes -1, -2, -3, … (-)length
>>> greeting = 'hello, world'
>>> greeting[-1]
'd'
>>> 'hello world'[-1]
'd‘
>>>greeting[-11] # same as greeting[0]
‘h’

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Traversal using while loop
fruit = ‘banana’
index = 0
while (index < len(fruit):
print(fruit[index])
index+=1
What will be printed?

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 Slicing
•A substring of a string is obtained by taking a slice.
•Need to get continuous section of a string using a colon operator.
>>> s = 'Monty Python'

M o n t y P y t h o n
>>> print(s[0:2])
Mo
>>>print(s[:2]) #What will be printed?
>>>print(s[5:]) # What will be printed?
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Slicing cont’d
▪ You can use indexes to slice (extract a piece of) a string
▪ aStr[i:j] is the substring that begins with index i and ends with (but does not
include) index j H E L L O , W O R L D
>>> greeting = ‘HELLO, WORLD'
>>> greeting[1:3] 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
'EL'
>>> greeting[-3:-1] -12 -11 -10 -9 -8 -7 -6 -5 -4 -3 -2 -1
'RL'
▪ omit begin or end to mean 'as far as you can go'
>>> print(greeting[:4], greeting[7:])
HELL WORLD
▪ aStr[i:j:k] is the same, but takes only every k-th character
>>> greeting[3:10:2]#steps by 2, picking every other character
'L,WR‘
Takeaway exercise: make it step by 3

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 Slice by step example
• Let's say we have these toy cars in a line:
• Each letter is a different car.
• Now, how can we pick certain cars from this line? A B C D E F G H I J K L M
• we can use slicing with steps.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
• Starting Point:
•Imagine you want to start picking cars from the first car.
•Your starting point is the first car, which we call car ‘A’
• Ending Point:
• You want to stop picking cars before a certain car.
• Let's say we want to stop before car, ‘M’
• Step:
• The step is how many cars you want to skip each time you pick a car.
• If you want to pick every second car, it means you take one car, skip one, take the next, skip one, and so on.

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Implemented:

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Takeaway Exercise

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A character to far
>>>fruit = ‘banana’
>>>print(fruit[6])
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> IndexError: string index out of range

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String concatenation
# done using the + operator
string1 = "Hello"
string2 = "World"
combined = string1 + " " + string2
print(combined) # prints the text "Hello World"

# done using the join method

words = ["Hello", "World"] # list
combined = " ".join(words)
print(combined)# prints the text "Hello World"

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Looping and counting
• The following program counts the number of times the letter a appears
in a string:

• Takeaway Exercise: Encapsulate this code in a function named count,

and generalize it so that it accepts the string and the letter as
arguments.

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The in operator
•The keyword in is a Boolean operator that takes two
strings and returns True if the first appears as a
substring in the second:
>>> 'a' in 'banana'
True
>>> 'seed' in 'banana'
False

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String comparison
• The comparison operators work on strings.
• To see if two strings are equal:
if word == 'banana':
print('All right, bananas.')
• Other comparison operations are useful for putting words in alphabetical order:
word = input(“Please enter your word”)
if word < 'banana':
print('Your word,' + word + ', comes before banana.')
elif word > 'banana':
print('Your word,' + word + ', comes after banana.')
else: print('All right, bananas.')

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String comparison cont’d
• Note that Python is case sensitive.
• All the uppercase letters come before all the lowercase letters, so:
Your word, Pineapple, comes before banana.
• A common way to address this problem is to convert strings to a
standard format, such as all lowercase, before performing the
comparison.
• Takeaway question: How do you convert a string into all lowercase?

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string methods
• Strings are an example of Python objects.
• An object contains both data (the actual string itself) and methods,
which are effectively functions that are built into the object and are
available to any instance of the object.
• Python has a function called dir which lists the methods available for
an object.
• The type function shows the type of an object and the dir function
shows the available methods (next slide)

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String methods
•['capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode',
'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'format_map',
'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isascii', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit',
'isidentifier', 'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable', 'isspace',
'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip',
'maketrans', 'partition', 'removeprefix', 'removesuffix',
'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit',
'rstrip', 'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase',
'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']

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String commands cont’d
• You can access the string methods by dot operator
• your editor might pop up a selection window
— typically by pressing Tab — showing all the methods

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String Methods cont’d
▪ A method is a function that is bundled together with a particular type of
object
▪ A string method is a function that works on a string

▪ This is the syntax of a method:

anObject.methodName(parameterList)
▪ For example,

>>> 'avocado'.index('a')
0
• returns the index of the first 'a' in 'avocado'
▪ You can also use a variable of type string

>>> fruit = 'avocado'

>>> fruit.index('a')
0

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String Methods cont’d
▪ Python has many very useful string methods
▪ You should always look for and use an existing string method before coding it
again for yourself. Here are some
s.capitalize()
s.count()
s.endswith() / s.startswith()
s.find() / s.index()
s.format()
s.isalpha()/s.isdigit()/s.islower()/s.isspace()
s.join()
s.lower() / s.upper()
s.replace()
s.split()
s.strip()

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The split() method
▪ The string method split() lets us separate a string into useful parts
∙ Common use: splitting a sentence into its words

▪ Splits by space character by default,

▪ but you can give it a different 'separator' string

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The strip() method
• The string method strip() “cleans” the edges of a string by removing
the character(s) you specify (default: spaces)

• Takeaway question: Why is the “!” not removed in the above output?
• The string module contains a useful variable for this, called
punctuation (like how the math module has pi)

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The split() and strip() together
▪ The split method is useful for extracting words, and the strip method is
useful for cleaning them up
▪ Remember that strip() is a string method, not a list method

• So, how can we clean up every word in a sentence, once we've split it?
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split() and strip() together cont’d
▪ The strip() method works on one “word” at a time
▪ So, take it one word at a time

• Here items in the list are string each

• Takeaway question: why can't we just use the replace() method to
get rid of punctuation like this?
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Method parameters
▪ Like any function, a method has zero or more parameters
▪ Even if the parameter list is empty, the method still works on the
'calling' object:

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Method parameters cont’d
• The islapha () method in python returns ‘True’ if all the characters in
a string are alphabetic and there is at least one character in the string.
Otherwise, it returns ‘False’
• Alphabetic characters are those defined in the Unicode character
database as “Letter,” including both uppercase and lowercase letters.

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Method parameters cont’d
▪ The replace() method takes two or three parameters: mandatory:
‘old’ and ‘new’; and ‘count’ (optional)
▪ If ‘count’ is not provided, all occurrences of ‘old’ will be replaced by ‘new’
▪ If ‘count’ is provided, only the first ‘count’ occurrences of ‘old’ will be
replaced with ‘new’
▪ Example:

▪ How to replace only the second and the fifth occurrence of ‘saw’ with
‘SOW’, to output: I saw a SOW cutting a saw. I never saw such a SOW!
▪ (next slide)

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Check it!

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Strings are immutable
▪ A string is immutable -- once created it can not be modified
▪ Any operation that appears to modify a string actually creates a new string; the original
string is not changed

>>> aStr = 'my cat is catatonic'

>>> newStr = aStr.replace('cat', 'dog')
>>> newStr
'my dog is dogatonic'
>>> aStr
'my cat is catatonic'
▪ However, you can associate the old string name with the new object
>>> aStr = 'my cat is catatonic'
>>> aStr = aStr.replace('cat', 'dog')
>>> aStr
'my dog is dogatonic'

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Strings and the print () function
▪ The print() function always prints a string. The input() function
always inputs a string.
▪ Every object in Python has a string representation. Therefore, every
object can be printed.
▪ When you print a number, a list or a function it is the string
representation of the object that is printed
▪ print() takes 0 or more arguments and prints their string
representations, separated by spaces

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The print separator and end
▪By default, print() separates
multiple outputs with spaces

▪ You can change this to any string that you want,

for example, a colon and a space (': ')

▪ By default, print() ends its output

with a newline ('\n')

▪ You can change this, for example,

to a hyphen or a white space

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The string format() method
▪ The format() method allows you to create formatted strings by
embedding expressions inside string literals, using curly braces {} as
placeholder and allows flexible formatting options
▪ format() can take multiple arguments, which are inserted into the
placeholders in the string

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The in and not in operators
• The in operator tests for membership. When both of the arguments to
in are strings, in checks whether the left argument is a substring of the
right argument

• Note that a string is a substring of itself, and the empty string is a

substring of any other string.

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The in and not in operators cont’d
• The not in operator returns the logical opposite results of in:
•

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Takeaway Exercises
1. Combining the in operator with string concatenation using +, and
write a function that removes all the vowels from a string
2. What is the result of each

3. Write a function that recognizes palindromes.

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Takeaway Exercises cont’d
1. Write a function that counts how many times a substring occurs in a
string which responds as follows when called”

2. Write a function that removes the first occurrence of a string from

another string, responding as follows when called:

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 Takeaway Exercises cont’d
1. Take the following Python code that stores a
string:
str = “X-DSPAM-Confidence:0.8475”
Use find and string slicing to extract the portion of the
string after the colon character and then use the float
function to convert the extracted string into a floating
point number.
2. Explore the built in functions defined in the
string module
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 Takeaway Exercises cont’d
1. Write a Python program to print the index of a character in a string.
Sample string: w3resource
Expected output:
Current character w position at 0
Current character 3 position at 1
Current character r position at 2
2. Explore string tutorial and exercises on:
https://www.w3schools.com/python/python_strings.asp

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 End of Chapter 7

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