Practical Programming, 2nd Edition

Creating Strings of Characters

Computers may have been invented to do arithmetic, but these days, most of them spend a lot of their time processing text. Many programs create text, store it, search it, and move it from one place to another.

In Python, text is represented as a string, which is a sequence of characters (letters, digits, and symbols). The type whose values are sequences of characters is str. The characters consist of those from the Latin alphabet found on most North American keyboards, as well as Chinese morphograms, chemical symbols, musical symbols, and much more.

In Python, we indicate that a value is a string by putting either single or double quotes around it. As we will see in ​Using Special Characters in Strings​, single ...