Text Processing in Python

Chapter 2. Basic String Operations

	The cheapest, fastest and most reliable components of a computer system are those that aren't there.
	--Gordon Bell, Encore Computer Corporation

If you are writing programs in Python to accomplish text processing tasks, most of what you need to know is in this chapter. Sure, you will probably need to know how to do some basic things with pipes, files, and arguments to get your text to process (covered in Chapter 1); but for actually processing the text you have gotten, the string module and string methods—and Python's basic data structures—do most all of what you need done, almost all the time. To a lesser extent, the various custom modules to perform encodings, encryptions, and compressions are handy to have ...