Strings in Python
Let's learn about String data type in Python
WE'LL COVER THE FOLLOWING
• How to Create a String
How to Create a String #
Strings are usually created in one of three ways. You can use single, double or
triple quotes. Let’s take a look!
my_string = "Welcome to Python!"
another_string = 'The bright red fox jumped the fence.'
a_long_string = '''This is a
multi-line string. It covers more than
one line'''
print(my_string)
print(another_string)
print(a_long_string)
The triple quoted line can be done with three single quotes or three double
quotes. Either way, they allow the programmer to write strings over multiple
lines. If you print it out, you will notice that the output retains the line breaks.
If you need to use single quotes in your string, then wrap it in double quotes.
See the following example.
my_string = "I'm a Python programmer!"
otherString = 'The word "python" usually refers to a snake'
tripleString = """Here's another way to embed "quotes" in a string"""
print(my_string)
print(otherString)
print(tripleString)
The code above demonstrates how you could put single quotes or double
quotes into a string. There’s actually one other way to create a string and that
is by using the str method. Here’s how it works:
my_number = 123
my_string = str(my_number)
print(my_number)
print(my_string)
If you run the code above, you’ll notice that you have transformed the integer
value into a string and assigned the string to the variable my_string. This is
known as casting. You can cast some data types into other data types, like
numbers into strings. But you’ll also find that you can’t always do the reverse,
such as casting a string like ‘ABC’ into an integer. If you do that, you’ll end up
with an error like the one in the following example:
int('ABC')
# ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: 'ABC'
We will look at exception handling in a later chapter, but as you may have
guessed from the message, this means that you cannot convert a literal into an
integer. However, if you had done
x = int("123")
then that would have worked fine.
It should be noted that a string is one of Python immutable types. What this
means is that you cannot change a string’s content after creation. Let’s try to
change one to see what happens:
my_string = "abc"
my_string[0] = "d"
# TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
Here we try to change the first character from an “a” to a “d”; however this
raises a TypeError that stops us from doing so. Now you may think that by
assigning a new string to the same variable that you’ve changed the string.
Let’s see if that’s true:
my_string = "abc"
print(id(my_string)) # 140029410169552
my_string = "def"
print(id(my_string)) # 140029409549312
my_string = my_string + "ghi"
print(id(my_string)) # 140029409549200
By checking the id of the object, we can determine that any time we assign a
new value to the variable, its identity changes.
Note that in Python 2.x, strings can only contain ASCII characters. If you
require unicode in Python 2.x, then you will need to precede your string with
a u. Here’s an example:
my_unicode_string = u"This is unicode!"
The example above doesn’t actually contain any unicode, but it should give
you the general idea. In Python 3.x, all strings are unicode.
Concatenation is a big word that means to combine or add two things
together. In this case, we want to know how to add two strings together. As
you might suspect, this operation is very easy in Python:
string_one = "My dog ate "
string_two = "my homework!"
string_three = string_one + string_two
print(string_one)
print(string_two)
print(string_three)
The ‘+’ operator concatenates the two strings into one.
