June 2009
Beginner to intermediate
504 pages
16h 27m
English
Content preview from Natural Language Processing with PythonBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Strings: Text Processing at the Lowest Level
It’s time to study a fundamental data type that we’ve been studiously avoiding so far. In earlier chapters we focused on a text as a list of words. We didn’t look too closely at words and how they are handled in the programming language. By using NLTK’s corpus interface we were able to ignore the files that these texts had come from. The contents of a word, and of a file, are represented by programming languages as a fundamental data type known as a string. In this section, we explore strings in detail, and show the connection between strings, words, texts, and files.
Basic Operations with Strings
Strings are specified using single quotes 
or double quotes 
, as shown in the following code
example. If a string contains a single quote, we must backslash-escape
the quote 
so Python knows a
literal quote character is intended, or else put the string in double
quotes . Otherwise, the quote
inside the string 
will be interpreted as a close quote, and the ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.