Module 3 Python

CHAPTER3: MANIPULATING STRINGS

1. Working with Strings

2. Useful String Methods
3. Project: Password Locker
4. Project: Adding Bullets to Wiki Markup
3.1 Working with strings String Literals
➢ String values begin and end with a single quote.
➢ But we want to use either double or single quotes within a string then we have a multiple ways to
do it as shown below.
Double Quotes
➢ One benefit of using double quotes is that the string can have a single quote character in it.

➢ Since the string begins with a double quote, Python knows that the single quote is part of the
string and not marking the end of the string.
Escape Characters
➢ If you need to use both single quotes and double quotes in the string, you’ll need to use escape
characters.
➢ An escape character consists of a backslash (\) followed by the character you want to add to the
string.

➢ Python knows that the single quote in Bob\'s has a backslash, it is not a single quote meant to end
the string value. The escape characters \' and \" allows to put single quotes and double quotes inside
your strings, respectively.
➢ Ex:

➢ The different special escape characters can be used in a program as listed below in a table.

Raw Strings
➢ You can place an r before the beginning quotation mark of a string to make it a raw string. A raw
string completely ignores all escape characters and prints any backslash that appears in the string

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Multiline Strings with Triple Quotes

➢ A multiline string in Python begins and ends with either three single quotes or three double
quotes.
➢ Any quotes, tabs, or newlines in between the “triple quotes” are considered part of the string.
Program

Output

➢ The following print() call would print identical text but doesn’t use a multiline string.

Multiline Comments
➢ While the hash character (#) marks the beginning of a comment for the rest of the line.
➢ A multiline string is often used for comments that span multiple lines.

Indexing and Slicing Strings

➢ Strings use indexes and slices the same way lists do. We can think of the string 'Hello world!'
as a list and each character in the string as an item with a corresponding index.

➢ The space and exclamation point are included in the character count, so 'Hello world!' is
12 characters long.
➢ If we specify an index, you’ll get the character at that position in the string.

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➢ If we specify a range from one index to another, the starting index is included and the ending
index is not.

➢ The substring we get from spam[0:5] will include everything from spam[0] to spam[4], leaving
out the space at index 5.
Note: slicing a string does not modify the original string.
The in and not in Operators with Strings
➢ The in and not in operators can be used with strings just like with list values.
➢ An expression with two strings joined using in or not in will evaluate to a Boolean True or False.

➢ These expressions test whether the first string (the exact string, case sensitive) can be found
within the second string.

3.2 Useful String Methods

➢ Several string methods analyze strings or create transformed string values.
The upper(), lower(), isupper(), and islower() String Methods
➢ The upper() and lower() string methods return a new string where all the letters in the
original string have been converted to uppercase or lowercase, respectively.

➢ These methods do not change the string itself but return new string values.
➢ If we want to change the original string, we have to call upper() or lower() on the string and
then assign the new string to the variable where the original was stored.
➢ The upper() and lower() methods are helpful if we need to make a case-insensitive comparison.

➢ In the following small program, it does not matter whether the user types Great, GREAT,
or grEAT, because the string is first converted to lowercase.

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Program Output

➢ The isupper() and islower() methods will return a Boolean True value if the string has at least one
letter and all the letters are uppercase or lowercase, respectively. Otherwise, the method returns
False.

➢ Since the upper() and lower() string methods themselves return strings, you can call string
methods on those returned string values as well. Expressions that do this will look like a chain of
method calls.

The isX String Methods

➢ There are several string methods that have names beginning with the word is. These methods
return a Boolean value that describes the nature of the string.
➢ Here are some common isX string methods:
o isalpha() returns True if the string consists only of letters and is not blank.
o isalnum() returns True if the string consists only of letters and numbers and is not blank.
o isdecimal() returns True if the string consists only of numeric characters and is not blank.
o isspace() returns True if the string consists only of spaces, tabs, and newlines and is not
blank.
o istitle() returns True if the string consists only of words that begin with an uppercase letter
followed by only lowercase letters.

➢ The isX string methods are helpful when you need to validate user input.
➢ For example, the following program repeatedly asks users for their age and a password until
they provide valid input.

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Program output

The startswith() and endswith() String Methods

➢ The startswith() and endswith() methods return True if the string value they are called on begins
or ends (respectively) with the string passed to the method; otherwise, they return False.

➢ These methods are useful alternatives to the == equals operator if we need to check only
whether the first or last part of the string, rather than the whole thing, is equal to another string.

The join() and split() String Methods

Join()
➢ The join() method is useful when we have a list of strings that need to be joined together into
a single string value.
➢ The join() method is called on a string, gets passed a list of strings, and returns a string.
The returned string is the concatenation of each string in the passed-in list.

➢ string join() calls on is inserted between each string of the list argument.
o Ex: when join(['cats', 'rats', 'bats']) is called on the ', ' string, the returned string is 'cats, rats, bats'.
o join() is called on a string value and is passed a list value.
Split()
➢ The split() method is called on a string value and returns a list of strings.

➢ We can pass a delimiter string to the split() method to specify a different string to split upon.

➢ A common use of split() is to split a multiline string along the newline characters.

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➢ Passing split() the argument '\n' lets us split the multiline string stored in spam along the
newlines and return a list in which each item corresponds to one line of the string.
Justifying Text with rjust(), ljust(), and center()
➢ The rjust() and ljust() string methods return a padded version of the string they are called on,
with spaces inserted to justify the text.
➢ The first argument to both methods is an integer length for the justified string.

➢ 'Hello'.rjust(10) says that we want to right-justify 'Hello' in a string of total length 10. 'Hello' is
five characters, so five spaces will be added to its left, giving us a string of 10 characters with 'Hello'
justified right.
➢ An optional second argument to rjust() and ljust() will specify a fill character other than a space
character.

➢ The center() string method works like ljust() and rjust() but centers the text rather than justifying
it to the left or right.

➢ These methods are especially useful when you need to print tabular data that has the
correct spacing.
➢ In the below program, we define a printPicnic() method that will take in a dictionary of
information and use center(), ljust(), and rjust() to display that information in a neatly aligned table-
like format.
o The dictionary that we’ll pass to printPicnic() is picnicItems.
o In picnicItems, we have 4 sandwiches, 12 apples, 4 cups, and 8000 cookies. We want to
organize this information into two columns, with the name of the item on the left and the
quantity on the right.

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Program output
Removing Whitespace with strip(), rstrip(), and lstrip()
➢ The strip() string method will return a new string without any whitespace characters at
the beginning or end.
➢ The lstrip() and rstrip() methods will remove whitespace characters from the left and right
ends, respectively.

➢ Optionally, a string argument will specify which characters on the ends should be stripped.

➢ Passing strip() the argument 'ampS' will tell it to strip occurences of a, m, p, and capital S
from the ends of the string stored in spam.
➢ The order of the characters in the string passed to strip() does not matter: strip('ampS') will
do the same thing as strip('mapS') or strip('Spam').

Copying and Pasting Strings with the pyperclip Module

➢ The pyperclip module has copy() and paste() functions that can send text to and receive text
from your computer’s clipboard.

➢ Of course, if something outside of your program changes the clipboard contents, the
paste() function will return it.

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3.3 Project: Password Locker

➢ We probably have accounts on many different websites.
➢ It’s a bad habit to use the same password for each of them because if any of those sites has
a security breach, the hackers will learn the password to all of your other accounts.
➢ It’s best to use password manager software on your computer that uses one master password
to unlock the password manager.
➢ Then you can copy any account password to the clipboard and paste it into the website’s
Password field
➢ The password manager program you’ll create in this example isn’t secure, but it offers a
basic demonstration of how such programs work.
Step 1: Program Design and Data Structures
➢ We have to run this program with a command line argument that is the account’s name--for
instance, email or blog. That account’s password will be copied to the clipboard so that the user can
paste it into a Password field. The user can have long, complicated passwords without having to
memorize them.
➢ We need to start the program with a #! (shebang) line and should also write a comment that
briefly describes the program. Since we want to associate each account’s name with its password,
we can store these as strings in a dictionary.

Step 2: Handle Command Line Arguments

➢ The command line arguments will be stored in the variable sys.argv.
➢ The first item in the sys.argv list should always be a string containing the program’s
filename ('pw.py'), and the second item should be the first command line argument.

Step 3: Copy the Right Password

➢ The account name is stored as a string in the variable account, you need to see whether it exists in
the PASSWORDS dictionary as a key. If so, you want to copy the key’s value to the clipboard
using pyperclip.copy().

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➢ This new code looks in the PASSWORDS dictionary for the account name. If the account name
is a key in the dictionary, we get the value corresponding to that key, copy it to the clipboard, and
print a message saying that we copied the value. Otherwise, we print a message saying there’s no
account with that name.
➢ On Windows, you can create a batch file to run this program with the win-R Run window. Type
the following into the file editor and save the file as pw.bat in the C:\Windows folder:

➢ With this batch file created, running the password-safe program on Windows is just a matter
of pressing win-R and typing pw <account name>.

3.4 Project: Adding Bullets to Wiki Markup

➢ When editing a Wikipedia article, we can create a bulleted list by putting each list item on its
own line and placing a star in front.
➢ But say we have a really large list that we want to add bullet points to. We could just type those
stars at the beginning of each line, one by one. Or we could automate this task with a short Python
script.
➢ The bulletPointAdder.py script will get the text from the clipboard, add a star and space to the
beginning of each line, and then paste this new text to the clipboard.
➢ Ex:

Program output
Step 1: Copy and Paste from the Clipboard
➢ You want the bulletPointAdder.py program to do the following:
1. Paste text from the clipboard
2. Do something to it

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3. Copy the new text to the clipboard

➢ Steps 1 and 3 are pretty straightforward and involve the pyperclip.copy() and
pyperclip.paste() functions. saving the following program as bulletPointAdder.py:

Step 2: Separate the Lines of Text and Add the Star

➢ The call to pyperclip.paste() returns all the text on the clipboard as one big string. If we used the
“List of Lists of Lists” example, the string stored in text.
➢ The \n newline characters in this string cause it to be displayed with multiple lines when it is
printed or pasted from the clipboard.
➢ We could write code that searches for each \n newline character in the string and then adds the
star just after that. But it would be easier to use the split() method to return a list of strings, one for
each line in the original string, and then add the star to the front of each string in the list.
➢ We split the text along its newlines to get a list in which each item is one line of the text. For

each line, we add a star and a space to the start of the line. Now each string in lines begins with a
star.
Step 3: Join the Modified Lines
➢ The lines list now contains modified lines that start with stars.
➢ pyperclip.copy() is expecting a single string value, not a list of string values. To make this
single string value, pass lines into the join() method to get a single string joined from the list’s
strings.
➢ When this program is run, it replaces the text on the clipboard with text that has stars at the start
of each line.

10 Anu H, Assistant Professor, Dept. of ECE, JSSATEB