VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE

Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &

TECHNOLOGY

Python Application Programing-18EC646

Module 2- Strings
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

Module 2
• Topic 1: Iteration
• Topic 2: Strings
• Topic 3: Files
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

Topic 2: Strings
2.1 A string is a sequence 2.10 Parsing strings
2.2 Getting the length of a string using len 2.11 Format operator
2.3 Traversal through a string with a loop 2.12 Debugging
2.4 String slices 2.13 Exercises
2.5 Strings are immutable
2.6 Looping and counting
2.7 The in operator
2.8 String comparison
2.9 String methods
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.1 A string is a sequence

A string is a sequence of characters. You can access the characters one at a time with the
bracket operator:
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> letter = fruit[1]
The second statement extracts the character at index position 1 from the fruit variable and
assigns it to the letter variable. The expression in brackets is called an index. The index
indicates which character in the sequence you want (hence the name). But you might not
get what you expect:
>>> print(letter)
a
For most people, the first letter of “banana” is “b”, not “a”. But in Python, the index is an
offset from the beginning of the string, and the offset of the first letter is zero.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.1 A string is a sequence

>>> letter = fruit[0]
>>> print(letter)
b
So “b” is the 0th letter (“zero-th”) of “banana”, “a” is the 1th letter (“one-th”), and “n” is
the 2th (“two-th”) letter.
You can use any expression, including variables and operators, as an index, but the value of
the index has to be an integer. Otherwise you get:
>>> letter = fruit[1.5]
TypeError: string indices must be integers
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.2 Getting the length of a string using len

len is a built-in function that returns the number of characters in a string:
>>> fruit = 'banana‘
>>> len(fruit)
6
To get the last letter of a string, you might be tempted to try something like this:
>>> length = len(fruit)
>>> last = fruit[length]
IndexError: string index out of range
The reason for the IndexError is that there is no letter in “banana” with the index 6. Since we started counting at zero, the six
letters are numbered 0 to 5. To get the last character, you have to subtract 1 from length: Alternatively, you can use negative
indices, which count backward from the end of the string. The expression fruit[-1] yields the last letter, fruit[-2] yields the
second to last, and so on.
>>> last = fruit[length-1]
>>> print(last)
a
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.3 Traversal through a string with a loop

A lot of computations involve processing a string one character at a time. Often they 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. One way to write a traversal is with a while
loop:
index = 0
while index < len(fruit):
letter = fruit[index]
print(letter)
index = index + 1
This loop traverses the string and displays each letter on a line by itself. The loop condition is
index < len(fruit), so when index is equal to the length of the string, the condition is false, and
the body of the loop is not executed. The last character accessed is the one with the index
len(fruit)-1, which is the last character in the string
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.3 Traversal through a string with a loop

Exercise 1: Write a while loop that starts at the last character in the string and
works its way backwards to the first character in the string, printing each letter on
a separate line, except backwards.
Another way to write a traversal is with a for loop:
for char in fruit: print(char)
Each time through the loop, the next character in the string is assigned to the
variable char. The loop continues until no characters are left.
fruit='banana'
index = len(fruit)-1
while index >=0:
letter = fruit[index]
print(letter)
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.4 String slices

A segment of a string is called a slice. Selecting a slice is similar to selecting a
character:
>>> s = 'Monty Python'
>>> print(s[0:5])
Monty
>>> print(s[6:12])
Python
The operator returns the part of the string from the “n-th” character to the “m-th”
character, including the first but excluding the last.
If you omit the first index (before the colon), the slice starts at the beginning of the
string. If you omit the second index, the slice goes to the end of the string:
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.4 String slices

>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> fruit[:3]
'ban'
>>> fruit[3:]
'ana'
If the first index is greater than or equal to the second the result is an empty string, represented by two
quotation marks:
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> fruit[3:3]
''
An empty string contains no characters and has length 0, but other than that, it is the same as any other string.
Exercise 2: Given that fruit is a string, what does fruit[:] mean?
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.5 Strings are immutable

It is tempting to use the operator on the left side of an assignment, with the
intention of changing a character in a string. For example:
>>> greeting = 'Hello, world!'
>>> greeting[0] = 'J'
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
The “object” in this case is the string and the “item” is the character you tried to
assign. For now, an object is the same thing as a value, but we will refine that
definition later. An item is one of the values in a sequence.
The reason for the error is that strings are immutable, which means you can’t
change an existing string. The best you can do is create a new string that is a
variation on the original:
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.5 Strings are immutable

>>> greeting = 'Hello, world!'
>>> new_greeting = 'J' + greeting[1:]
>>> print(new_greeting)
Jello, world!
This example concatenates a new first letter onto a slice of greeting. It has no effect
on the original string
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.6 Looping and counting

The following program counts the number of times the letter “a” appears in a string:
word = 'banana'
count = 0
for letter in word:
if letter == 'a':
count = count + 1
print(count)
This program demonstrates another pattern of computation called a counter. The
variable count is initialized to 0 and then incremented each time an “a” is found.
When the loop exits, count contains the result: the total number of a’s.
Exercise 3: Encapsulate this code in a function named count, and generalize it so
that it accepts the string and the letter as arguments.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.7 The in operator

The word 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
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.8 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:
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.')
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.8 String comparison

Python does not handle uppercase and lowercase letters the same way that people
do. 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. Keep that in mind in case
you have to defend yourself against a man armed with a Pineapple.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.9 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.
>>> stuff = 'Hello world‘
>>> type(stuff)
<class 'str‘>
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

>>> dir(stuff) 2.9 String methods

['capitalize', 'casefold', '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']
>>> help(str.capitalize)
Help on method_descriptor:
capitalize(...)
S.capitalize() -> str
Return a capitalized version of S, i.e. make the first character have upper case and
the rest lower case.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

While the dir function lists the methods, and

2.9 String you can use help to get some simple
methods
documentation on a method, a better source of documentation for string methods would be
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods.
Calling a method is similar to calling a function (it takes arguments and returns a value) but
the syntax is different. We call a method by appending the method name to the variable
name using the period as a delimiter.
For example, the method upper takes a string and returns a new string with all uppercase
letters:
Instead of the function syntax upper(word), it uses the method syntax word.upper().
>>> word = 'banana'
>>> new_word = word.upper()
>>> print(new_word)
BANANA
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.9 String methods

This form of dot notation specifies the name of the method, upper, and the name of the string
to apply the method to, word.
The empty parentheses indicate that this method takes no argument. A method call is called
an invocation; in this case, we would say that we are invoking upper on the word.
For example, there is a string method named find that searches for the position of one string
within another:
>>> word = 'banana'
>>> index = word.find('a')
>>> print(index)
1
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

In this example, we invoke find on2.9wordStringand pass the letter we are looking for as a
methods
parameter. The find method can find substrings as well as characters:
>>> word.find('na')
2
It can take as a second argument the index where it should start:
>>> word.find('na', 3)
4
One common task is to remove white space (spaces, tabs, or newlines) from the beginning
and end of a string using the strip method:
>>> line = ' Here we go '
>>> line.strip()
'Here we go'
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

Some methods such as startswith return2.9boolean

String methods
values.
>>> line = 'Have a nice day'
>>> line.startswith('Have')
True
>>> line.startswith('h')
False
You will note that startswith requires case to match, so sometimes we take a line and map it all
to lowercase before we do any checking using the lower method.
>>> line = 'Have a nice day'
>>> line.startswith('h')
False
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

>>> line.lower() 2.9 String methods

'have a nice day'
>>> line.lower().startswith('h')
True
In the last example, the method lower is called and then we use startswith to see if
the resulting lowercase string starts with the letter “h”. As long as we are careful
with the order, we can make multiple method calls in a single expression.
Exercise 4: There is a string method called count that is similar to the function in
the previous exercise. Read the documentation of this method at: https://
docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods
Write an invocation that counts the number of times the letter a occurs in
“banana”.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.10 Parsing strings

Often, we want to look into a string and find a substring. For example if we were presented a
series of lines formatted as follows:
From stephen.marquard@ uct.ac.za Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008
and we wanted to pull out only the second half of the address (i.e., uct.ac.za) from each line,
we can do this by using the find method and string slicing.
First, we will find the position of the at-sign in the string. Then we will find the position of the
first space after the at-sign. And then we will use string slicing to extract the portion of the
string which we are looking for.
>>> data = 'From [email protected] Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008'
>>> atpos = data.find('@')
>>> print(atpos)
21
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.10 Parsing strings

>>> sppos = data.find(' ',atpos)
>>> print(sppos)
31
>>> host = data[atpos+1:sppos]
>>> print(host)
uct.ac.za
We use a version of the find method which allows us to specify a position in the
string where we want find to start looking. When we slice, we extract the characters
from “one beyond the at-sign through up to but not including the space character”
The documentation for the find method is available at
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.11 Format operator

The format operator, % allows us to construct strings, replacing parts of the strings
with the data stored in variables. When applied to integers, % is the modulus
operator. But when the first operand is a string, % is the format operator.
The first operand is the format string, which contains one or more format sequences
that specify how the second operand is formatted. The result is a string.
For example, the format sequence %d means that the second operand should be
formatted as an integer (“d” stands for “decimal”):
>>> camels = 42
>>> '%d' % camels
'42'
The result is the string ‘42’, which is not to be confused with the integer value 42
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.11 Format operator

A format sequence can appear anywhere in the string, so you can embed a value in a
sentence:
>>> camels = 42
>>> 'I have spotted %d camels.' % camels
'I have spotted 42 camels.‘
If there is more than one format sequence in the string, the second argument has to be a
tuple1(A tuple is a sequence of comma-separated values inside a pair of parenthesis) . Each
format sequence is matched with an element of the tuple, in order.
The following example uses %d to format an integer, %g to format a floating-point number
(don’t ask why), and %s to format a string:
>>> 'In %d years I have spotted %g %s.' % (3, 0.1, 'camels')
‘In 3 years I have spotted 0.1 camels.'
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.11 Format operator

The number of elements in the tuple must match the number of format sequences
in the string. The types of the elements also must match the format sequences:
>>> '%d %d %d' % (1, 2)
TypeError: not enough arguments for format string
>>> '%d' % 'dollars'
TypeError: %d format: a number is required, not str
In the first example, there aren’t enough elements; in the second, the element is
the wrong type. The format operator is powerful, but it can be difficult to use.
You can read more about it at https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#printf-
style-string-formatting.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.12 Debugging
A skill that you should cultivate as you program is always asking yourself, “What could go
wrong here?” or alternatively, “What crazy thing might our user do to crash our (seemingly)
perfect program?” For example, look at the program which we used to demonstrate the
while loop in the Topic on iteration:
while True:
line = input('> ')
if line[0] == '#':
Continue
if line == 'done':
Break
print(line)
print('Done!')
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.12 Debugging
Look what happens when the user enters an empty line of input:
>hello there
hello there
># don't print this
>print this!
print this!
>
Traceback (most recent call last): File "copytildone.py", line 3, in <module>
if line[0] == '#': IndexError: string index out of range
The code works fine until it is presented an empty line. Then there is no zero-th character, so we get a
traceback. There are two solutions to this to make line three “safe” even if the line is empty
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.12 Debugging
One possibility is to simply use the startswith method which returns False if the string is
empty.
if line.startswith('#'):
Another way is to safely write the if statement using the guardian pattern and make sure the
second logical expression is evaluated only where there is at least one character in the
string.:
if len(line) > 0 and line[0] == '#':
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.13 Exercises
Exercise 5: 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.
 VIDYA VIKAS INSTITUTE
Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering OF ENGINEERING &
TECHNOLOGY

2.13 Exercises
str = 'X-DSPAM-Confidence:0.8475‘
colpos=str.find(':')
print(colpos)
18
part=str[colpos+1:]
print(part)
0.8475
part=float(part)
print(part)
0.8475