Python Tutorial: Strings Datatype

Farhan KhwajaFebruary 20th, 2015Last Updated: February 16th, 2015

0 183 1 minute read

Data stored in memory can of different types and Python like other languages have different standard data types. Sometime back we did a post on

Python Numbers. Today we will be covering other standard datatypes i.e. Strings.

Note: All examples shown in the post are based on python3.

Like other languages, python also has the same meaning/definition for Strings.

They are a contiguous set of characters enclosed within single/double quotation marks.

 
#!/usr/bin/python 
strA = "Hello "
strB = 'World!'

#Printing the above variables on screen

print strA #This will work in Python2
print strB #This will work in Python2

print( strA ) #This will work in Python3
print( strB ) #This will work in Python3

String Slicing:

Strings can be sliced i.e. subsets of a string, using the slice operator ([:] or []). The index starts from 0.

 
#!/usr/bin/python

print( strA[0] )   #prints the first character of variable strA
print( strA[1:3] ) #prints characters from first index to third
print( strA[3:] )  #prints characters from third index

String Concatenation:

Like other languages python also provides the functionality to concatenate strings. It is done its the + operator.

#!/usr/bin/python

print( "Print Concatenated Output: " + strA + strB )

If you try to concat another datatype using + operator, you would get an error ” cannot convert ‘int’ object to str implicitly“. So to achieve that we have two ways:

1. We can do by putting values using a comma inside print()

2. Other way, we can use an inbuilt function str(). This will convert any datatype to string thus, allowing us to use + operator

#!/usr/bin/python 

print( strA + 4 ) #This will give an error as mentioned above

#Correct Way to Concat String and another Datatype

print( strA, 4 ) #Method 1
print( strA + str(1234) ) #Method 2

Escape Characters:

The definition an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. It can be interpreted in a single as well as double quoted string.

Below is the list of escape characters with their description:

Some of the special operators

We only saw the + operator, but apart from this there are many others. Below is the list of all operators:

Formatting Operator

Formatting Operator %, is one of the features which reminded me of the time when I used to write code in C. Here in python it functions the same way:

Below is a list of formatting operators:

Example:

#!/usr/bin/python 

"""You can have multiple formatting operators, but remember the sequence of variables must be followed after % inside a bracket () separated by comma"""

num = 2
post_num = 129

print( "Code %s Learn" %num) 

print( "Code %s Learn\'s post number: %s" %(num,post_num))

You must have noticed that I have used Triple quotes in the above example. Triple quote is used for writing multi-line comments, whereas # is used for writing a single line comment.

Python also provides multiple built-in functions for String manipulations. Below is the gist of some functions: