A sequence of characters enclosed with single quotes(‘ and ‘) or double quotes(” and “) are called strings. In order to create a string variable just declare a name and assign a string value to it as given ahead.
name = ‘learner’ website = “codippa.com”
Checking type of string variable
Just to verify that a variable holds a string and is of string type, use type function with the name of the variable as argument as below.
name = "codippa" type(name) # prints <class 'str'> type("python") # prints <class 'str'>
Accessing characters of string
Individual characters of a python string can be accessed using their index within square brackets([ and ]) with the index of first character as 0. Example,
print(name[0]) # will return n
Character indexing starts from left to right with 0 as the index of left most character, 1 as index of second character from left and so on. In order to access rightmost(or last) character, you can use an index of length of the (string – 1) or simply -1. Example,
name = "codippa" # length of string is 7 print(name[6]) # access last character as (7 - 1) print(name[-1]) # access last character using -1
Thus, characters of strings in python can also be accessed from right to left using index starting from -1 with index of rightmost character as -1, index of second character from right as -2 and so on.
Accessing string characters within range
It is possible to access multiple characters of a string by their indexes. This is done by taking the indexes of the range of characters that need to be accessed and separating them by a colon(:) as shown below. Characters between start index and (end index -1) are included. In order to access all characters after a certain index just use that index followed by a colon(:), that is leave the end index.
name = "codippa" print(name[2:5]) # prints characters from index 2 to 4, that is, dip print(name[2:]) # prints all characters after character at second index, that is, dippa
It is also possible to use negative indexes while accessing characters with -1 as the index of rightmost character, -2 as second last character and so on. Note that indexes should be in order from left to right always.
name = "codippa" print(name[-3:-1]) # prints pp print(name[-3:]) # prints ppa