The Quick Python Book, Second 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 processing chunks of text—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 sequences of characters, which means you can use index or slice notation:

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