CSC 101 – Apploication of Information

and Communication Technology

Outline

 Strings
 Control Codes within Strings
 Slicing & Indexing Strings
 Concatenation
 Arithmetic Operators with Strings.
Strings and Characters
 In addition to processing numeric values, you can process
strings in Python.
 A string is a sequence of characters and can include text and
numbers.
Str = “Hello4you”
 String values must be enclosed in matching single quotes (') or
double quotes (").
 Python does not have a data type for characters.
 A single-character string represents a character. For example,
letter = 'A' # Same as letter = "A"
numChar = '4' # Same as numChar = "4"
message = "Good morning" # Same as message = 'Good morning‘
A string is a sequence of characters. Python treats
characters and strings the same way.
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Character encoding
 Computers use binary numbers internally.
 A character is stored in a computer as a sequence of 0s and
1s.
 Mapping a character to its binary representation is called
character encoding.
 There are different ways to encode a character.
 The manner in which characters are encoded is defined by an
encoding scheme.

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Character encoding: ASCII code
 One popular standard of character encoding is ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information
Interchange)
 7-bit encoding scheme for representing all
uppercase and lowercase letters, digits, punctuation
marks, and control characters.
 ASCII uses numbers 0 through 127 to represent
characters.

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Character encoding: Unicode code

 Python also supports Unicode.

 Unicode is an encoding scheme for representing
international characters.
 ASCII is a small subset of Unicode.
 Unicode was established by the Unicode Consortium to
support the interchange, processing, and display of written
texts in the world’s diverse languages.
 A Unicode starts with \u, followed by four hexadecimal digits
that run from \u0000 to \uFFFF.

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The ord and chr Functions

 Python provides the ord(ch) function for returning the ASCII

code for the character ch and the chr(code) function for
returning the character represented by the code. For example,

>>> ch = 'a'
>>> ord(ch)
97
>>> chr(98)
'b'
>>> ord('A')
65
>>>
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Escape Sequences for Special
Characters

 Suppose you want to print a message with quotation marks

in the output. Can you write a statement like this?
print("He said, "John's program is easy to read"")
 No, this statement has an error.
▪ Python thinks the second quotation mark is the end of the string and does
not know what to do with the rest of the characters.
▪ To overcome this problem, Python uses a special notation to represent
special characters.
 This special notation, which consists of a backslash (\)
followed by a letter or a combination of digits, is called an
escape sequence.

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Escape Sequences for Special
Characters

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Escape Sequences for Special
Characters

 The \n character is also known as a newline, line break or

end-of-line (EOL) character, which signifies the end of a
line.
 The \f character forces the printer to print from the next
page.
 The \r character is used to move the cursor to the first
position on the same line.

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Printing without the Newline
 When you use the print function, it automatically
prints a linefeed (\n) to cause the output to advance
to the next line.
 If you don’t want this to happen after the print
function is finished, you can invoke the print
function by passing a special argument
 end = "anyendingstring"
 using the following syntax:
▪ print(item, end = "anyendingstring")

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Printing without the Newline
 For example:
radius = 3
print("The area is", radius * radius * math.pi, end = ' ')
print("and the perimeter is", 2 * radius)

 Displays:
The area is 28.26 and the perimeter is 6

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The str Function

 The str function can be used to convert a number into a

string. For example:

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String indexing
 Each character in a string has a numbered position called an
index.
 Character at the nth position in a string can be accessed by
putting the number n between two square brackets ([])
immediately after the string

Forgetting that counting starts with zero and

trying to access the first character in a string
with the index 1 results in an off-by-one error.
Index Error and negative Indexing
 The largest index in a string is always one less than the
string’s length.
 If you try to access an index beyond the end of a string, then
Python raises an IndexError:

 Strings also support negative indices

 Just like with positive indices, Python raises an

IndexError if you try to access a negative index less
than the index of the first character in the string:
String Slicing
 To extract a portion of a string is called Slicing.
 Each character can be accessed through index. The first
three letters of the string "fig pie“ can be sliced.

 flavor[0:3] is called a slice

 If you omit the first index in a slice, then Python assumes you want to
start at index 0:
 Similarly, if you omit the second index in the slice, then Python
assumes that it ends with the last character in the string
 If you omit both the first and second numbers in a slice, you get a string
that starts with the character at index 0 and ends with the last character
String Slicing
 Python won’t raise an IndexError when you
try to slice between boundaries that fall
outside the beginning or ending boundaries
of a string
The String Concatenation Operator

 You can use the + operator to add two numbers.

 The + operator can be used to concatenate two strings.
 For example:

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Reading Strings from the Console

 To read a string from the console, use the input function.

s1 = input("Enter a
string: ")
s2 = input("Enter a
string: ")
s3 = input("Enter a
string: ")
print("s1 is " + s1)
print("s2 is " + s2)
print("s3 is " + s3)
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Mathematical Functions, Strings, and
Objects
 In Python, a number is an object, a string is an
object, and every datum is an object
Arithmetic Operators with Strings
 The + operator concatenates two strings together, which is
why the result of "2" + "2" is "22" and not "4".

 Strings can be multiplied by a number as long as that

number is an integer or whole number but the result is
concatination.

 Python raises a TypeError when a string is multiplied by a a

non-integer.

 Python throws a TypeError because it expects the objects on

both sides of the + operator to be of the same type.
Practice Examples

1. Create a string and print its length using len()

2. Create two strings, concatenate them, and
print the resulting string.
3. Create two strings, use concatenation to add a
space between them, and print the result.
4. Print the string "zing" by using slice notation
to specify the correct range of characters in
the string "bazinga".
Summary

 Strings
 Control Codes within Strings
 Slicing & Indexing Strings
 Concatenation
 Arithmetic Operators with Strings.