\index{sequence} \index{character} \index{bracket operator} \index{operator!bracket}
A string is a sequence of characters. You can access the characters one at a time with the bracket operator:
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> letter = fruit[1]
\index{index} \index{}
The second statement extracts the character at index position 1 from the
fruit variable and assigns it to the letter
variable.
The expression in brackets is called an index. The index indicates which character in the sequence you want (hence the name).
But you might not get what you expect:
>>> print(letter)
a
For most people, the first letter of "banana" is "b", not "a". But in Python, the index is an offset from the beginning of the string, and the offset of the first letter is zero.
>>> letter = fruit[0]
>>> print(letter)
b
So "b" is the 0th letter ("zero-th") of "banana", "a" is the 1th letter ("one-th"), and "n" is the 2th ("two-th") letter.
\index{index!starting at zero} \index{zero, index starting at}
You can use any expression, including variables and operators, as an index, but the value of the index has to be an integer. Otherwise you get:
\index{index} \index{} \index{exception!TypeError} \index{TypeError}
>>> letter = fruit[1.5]
TypeError: string indices must be integers
\index{len function} \index{function!len}
len is a built-in function that returns the number of
characters in a string:
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> len(fruit)
6
To get the last letter of a string, you might be tempted to try something like this:
\index{exception!IndexError} \index{IndexError}
>>> length = len(fruit)
>>> last = fruit[length]
IndexError: string index out of range
The reason for the IndexError is that there is no letter in
"banana" with the index 6. Since we started counting at
zero, the six letters are numbered 0 to 5. To get the last character,
you have to subtract 1 from length:
>>> last = fruit[length-1]
>>> print(last)
a
Alternatively, you can use negative indices, which count backward from
the end of the string. The expression fruit[-1] yields the
last letter, fruit[-2] yields the second to last, and so
on.
\index{index!negative} \index{negative index}
\index{traversal} \index{loop!traversal} \index{for loop} \index{loop!for} \index{statement!for} \index{traversal}
A lot of computations involve processing a string one character at a
time. Often they start at the beginning, select each character in turn,
do something to it, and continue until the end. This pattern of
processing is called a traversal. One way to write a
traversal is with a while loop:
index = 0
while index < len(fruit):
letter = fruit[index]
print(letter)
index = index + 1
This loop traverses the string and displays each letter on a line by
itself. The loop condition is index < len(fruit), so when
index is equal to the length of the string, the condition
is false, and the body of the loop is not executed. The last character
accessed is the one with the index len(fruit)-1, which is
the last character in the string.
Exercise 1: Write a while loop that starts at the last
character in the string and works its way backwards to the first
character in the string, printing each letter on a separate line, except
backwards.
Another way to write a traversal is with a for loop:
for char in fruit:
print(char)
Each time through the loop, the next character in the string is assigned
to the variable char. The loop continues until no
characters are left.
\index{slice operator} \index{operator!slice} \index{index!slice} \index{string!slice} \index{slice!string}
A segment of a string is called a slice. Selecting a slice is similar to selecting a character:
>>> s = 'Monty Python'
>>> print(s[0:5])
Monty
>>> print(s[6:12])
Python
The operator [n:m] returns the part of the string from the "n-th" character to the "m-th" character, including the first but excluding the last.
If you omit the first index (before the colon), the slice starts at the beginning of the string. If you omit the second index, the slice goes to the end of the string:
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> fruit[:3]
'ban'
>>> fruit[3:]
'ana'
If the first index is greater than or equal to the second the result is an empty string, represented by two quotation marks:
\index{quotation mark}
>>> fruit = 'banana'
>>> fruit[3:3]
''
An empty string contains no characters and has length 0, but other than that, it is the same as any other string.
Exercise 2: Given that fruit is a string, what does
fruit[:] mean?
\index{copy!slice} \index{slice!copy}
\index{mutability} \index{immutability} \index{string!immutable}
It is tempting to use the operator on the left side of an assignment, with the intention of changing a character in a string. For example:
\index{TypeError} \index{exception!TypeError}
>>> greeting = 'Hello, world!'
>>> greeting[0] = 'J'
TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment
The "object" in this case is the string and the "item" is the character you tried to assign. For now, an object is the same thing as a value, but we will refine that definition later. An item is one of the values in a sequence.
\index{object} \index{item assignment} \index{assignment!item} \index{immutability}
The reason for the error is that strings are immutable, which means you can't change an existing string. The best you can do is create a new string that is a variation on the original:
>>> greeting = 'Hello, world!'
>>> new_greeting = 'J' + greeting[1:]
>>> print(new_greeting)
Jello, world!
This example concatenates a new first letter onto a slice of
greeting. It has no effect on the original string.
\index{concatenation}
\index{counter} \index{counting and looping} \index{looping and counting} \index{looping!with strings}
The following program counts the number of times the letter "a" appears in a string:
word = 'banana'
count = 0
for letter in word:
if letter == 'a':
count = count + 1
print(count)
This program demonstrates another pattern of computation called a
counter. The variable count is initialized
to 0 and then incremented each time an "a" is found. When the
loop exits, count contains the result: the total number of
a's.
\index{encapsulation}
Exercise 3: Encapsulate this code in a function named count, and
generalize it so that it accepts the string and the letter as arguments.
\index{in operator} \index{operator!in} \index{boolean operator} \index{operator!boolean}
The word in is a boolean operator that takes two strings
and returns True if the first appears as a substring in the
second:
>>> 'a' in 'banana'
True
>>> 'seed' in 'banana'
False
\index{string!comparison} \index{comparison!string}
The comparison operators work on strings. To see if two strings are equal:
if word == 'banana':
print('All right, bananas.')
Other comparison operations are useful for putting words in alphabetical order:
if word < 'banana':
print('Your word,' + word + ', comes before banana.')
elif word > 'banana':
print('Your word,' + word + ', comes after banana.')
else:
print('All right, bananas.')
Python does not handle uppercase and lowercase letters the same way that people do. All the uppercase letters come before all the lowercase letters, so:
Your word, Pineapple, comes before banana.
A common way to address this problem is to convert strings to a standard format, such as all lowercase, before performing the comparison. Keep that in mind in case you have to defend yourself against a man armed with a Pineapple.
Strings are an example of Python objects. An object contains both data (the actual string itself) and methods, which are effectively functions that are built into the object and are available to any instance of the object.
Python has a function called dir which lists the methods
available for an object. The type function shows the type
of an object and the dir function shows the available
methods.
>>> stuff = 'Hello world'
>>> type(stuff)
<class 'str'>
>>> dir(stuff)
[... 'capitalize', 'casefold', 'center', 'count', 'encode',
'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'format', 'format_map',
'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdecimal', 'isdigit',
'isidentifier', 'islower', 'isnumeric', 'isprintable',
'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower',
'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'partition', 'replace', 'rfind',
'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip',
'split', 'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase',
'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill']
>>> help(str.capitalize)
Help on method_descriptor:
capitalize(self, /)
Return a capitalized version of the string.
More specifically, make the first character have upper
case and the rest lower case.
>>>
While the dir function lists the methods, and you can use
help to get some simple documentation on a method, a better
source of documentation for string methods would be
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods.
Calling a method is similar to calling a function (it takes arguments and returns a value) but the syntax is different. We call a method by appending the method name to the variable name using the period as a delimiter.
For example, the method upper takes a string and returns a
new string with all uppercase letters:
\index{method} \index{string!method}
Instead of the function syntax upper(word), it uses the
method syntax word.upper().
\index{dot notation}
>>> word = 'banana'
>>> new_word = word.upper()
>>> print(new_word)
BANANA
This form of dot notation specifies the name of the method,
upper, and the name of the string to apply the method to,
word. The empty parentheses indicate that this method takes
no argument.
\index{parentheses!empty}
A method call is called an invocation; in this case, we
would say that we are invoking upper on the
word.
\index{invocation}
For example, there is a string method named find that
searches for the position of one string within another:
>>> word = 'banana'
>>> index = word.find('a')
>>> print(index)
1
In this example, we invoke find on word and
pass the letter we are looking for as a parameter.
The find method can find substrings as well as characters:
>>> word.find('na')
2
It can take as a second argument the index where it should start:
\index{optional argument} \index{argument!optional}
>>> word.find('na', 3)
4
One common task is to remove white space (spaces, tabs, or newlines)
from the beginning and end of a string using the strip
method:
>>> line = ' Here we go '
>>> line.strip()
'Here we go'
Some methods such as startswith return boolean values.
>>> line = 'Have a nice day'
>>> line.startswith('Have')
True
>>> line.startswith('h')
False
You will note that startswith requires case to match, so
sometimes we take a line and map it all to lowercase before we do any
checking using the lower method.
>>> line = 'Have a nice day'
>>> line.startswith('h')
False
>>> line.lower()
'have a nice day'
>>> line.lower().startswith('h')
True
In the last example, the method lower is called and then we
use startswith to see if the resulting lowercase string
starts with the letter "h". As long as we are careful with the order, we
can make multiple method calls in a single expression.
\index{count method} \index{method!count}
Exercise 4: There is a string method called count that is similar to
the function in the previous exercise. Read the documentation of this
method at:
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods
Write an invocation that counts the number of times the letter a occurs in "banana".
Often, we want to look into a string and find a substring. For example if we were presented a series of lines formatted as follows:
From stephen.marquard@ uct.ac.za Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008
and we wanted to pull out only the second half of the address (i.e.,
uct.ac.za) from each line, we can do this by using the
find method and string slicing.
First, we will find the position of the at-sign in the string. Then we will find the position of the first space after the at-sign. And then we will use string slicing to extract the portion of the string which we are looking for.
>>> data = 'From [email protected] Sat Jan 5 09:14:16 2008'
>>> atpos = data.find('@')
>>> print(atpos)
21
>>> sppos = data.find(' ',atpos)
>>> print(sppos)
31
>>> host = data[atpos+1:sppos]
>>> print(host)
uct.ac.za
>>>
We use a version of the find method which allows us to
specify a position in the string where we want find to
start looking. When we slice, we extract the characters from "one beyond
the at-sign through up to but not including the space character".
The documentation for the find method is available at
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods.
\index{formatted string literals}
A formatted string literal (often referred to simply as an f-string)
allows Python expressions to be used within string literals. This is
accomplished by prepending an f to the string literal and enclosing
expressions in curly braces {}.
For example, wrapping a variable name in curly braces inside an f-string will cause it to be replaced by its value:
>>> camels = 42
>>> f'{camels}'
'42'
The result is the string '42', which is not to be confused with the integer value 42.
An expression can appear anywhere in the string, so you can embed a value in a sentence:
>>> camels = 42
>>> f'I have spotted {camels} camels.'
'I have spotted 42 camels.'
Several expressions can be included within a single string literal in order to create more complex strings.
>>> years = 3
>>> count = .1
>>> species = 'camels'
>>> f'In {years} years I have spotted {count} {species}.'
'In 3 years I have spotted 0.1 camels.'
Formatted string literals are powerful, and they can do even more than is covered here. You can read more about them at
https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/inputoutput.html#formatted-string-literals.
\index{debugging}
A skill that you should cultivate as you program is always asking yourself, "What could go wrong here?" or alternatively, "What crazy thing might our user do to crash our (seemingly) perfect program?"
For example, look at the program which we used to demonstrate the
while loop in the chapter on iteration:
\VerbatimInput{../code3/copytildone2.py}
Look what happens when the user enters an empty line of input:
> hello there
hello there
> # don't print this
> print this!
print this!
>
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "copytildone.py", line 3, in <module>
if line[0] == '#':
IndexError: string index out of range
The code works fine until it is presented an empty line. Then there is no zero-th character, so we get a traceback. There are two solutions to this to make line three "safe" even if the line is empty.
One possibility is to simply use the startswith method
which returns False if the string is empty.
if line.startswith('#'):
\index{guardian pattern} \index{pattern!guardian}
Another way is to safely write the if statement using the
guardian pattern and make sure the second logical
expression is evaluated only where there is at least one character in
the string:
if len(line) > 0 and line[0] == '#':
counter : A variable used to count something, usually initialized to zero and then incremented. \index{counter}
empty string : A string with no characters and length 0, represented by two quotation marks. \index{empty string}
flag : A boolean variable used to indicate whether a condition is true or false. \index{flag}
invocation : A statement that calls a method. \index{invocation}
immutable : The property of a sequence whose items cannot be assigned. \index{immutability}
index : An integer value used to select an item in a sequence, such as a character in a string. \index{index} \index{}
item : One of the values in a sequence. \index{item}
method : A function that is associated with an object and called using dot notation. \index{method}
object : Something a variable can refer to. For now, you can use "object" and "value" interchangeably. \index{object}
search : A pattern of traversal that stops when it finds what it is looking for. \index{search pattern} \index{pattern!search}
sequence : An ordered set; that is, a set of values where each value is identified by an integer index. \index{sequence}
slice : A part of a string specified by a range of indices. \index{slice}
traverse : To iterate through the items in a sequence, performing a similar operation on each. \index{traversal}
Exercise 5: Slicing strings
Take the following Python code that stores a string:
str = 'X-DSPAM-Confidence: 0.8475'
Use find and string slicing to extract the portion of the
string after the colon character and then use the float
function to convert the extracted string into a floating point number.
\index{string method} \index{method!string}
Exercise 6: String methods
Read the documentation of the string methods at
https://docs.python.org/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods.
You might want to experiment with some of them to make sure you understand
how they work. strip and replace are
particularly useful.
The documentation uses a syntax that might be confusing. For example, in
find(sub[, start[, end]]), the brackets indicate optional arguments.
So sub is required, but start is optional, and
if you include start, then end is optional.