The Quick Python Book, Third Edition

Chapter 6. Strings

This chapter covers

• Understanding strings as sequences of characters
• Using basic string operations
• Inserting special characters and escape sequences
• Converting from objects to strings
• Formatting strings
• Using the byte type

Handling text—from user input to filenames to chunks of text to be processed—is a common chore in programming. Python comes with powerful tools to handle and format text. This chapter discusses the standard string and string-related operations in Python.

6.1. Strings as sequences of characters

For the purposes of extracting characters and substrings, strings can be considered to be sequences of characters, which means that you can use index or slice notation:

>>> x = "Hello" >>> x[0] 'H' >>> x[-1] ...