Strings—Python

Python has native support for Strings (which is basically text). Many computer programs need to process text data and Python’s string type has powerful features to make the lives of developers easy!

String Literals

Here are a few examples of how to create strings in Python using literals.

sq = 'String made with Single Quotes'
dq = "String made with double quotes"
tq = """String with triple quotes"""

Double quote strings let you embed an apostrope character without escaping it. So you can write “I’m a cat” as a string literal in Python. Triple quote strings allow white space and line breaks in the string.

Individual Characters

Python strings support the index operator, so you can access characters in a string using [n] where n is the position of the character you wish to access. Here are a few ways to process strings by individual characters.

kitties = 'I like kitties'

# Access by index
for i in range(0, len(kitties)):
    print(kitties[i])

# Access with iteration
for c in kitties:
    print (c)

Useful Methods

The Python string class has many useful methods. You can view them all at Python documentation. Here are some of the ones I use the most.

islower()

This checks if a string is all lower case characters.

kitties = 'i like kitties'
if kitties.islower():
    print(kitties, ' is lower case')
else:
    print(kitties, ' is not lower case')

lower()

Python Strings are immutable, but you can use lower to convert a string to all lower case.

kitties = 'I like kitties'

if not kitties.islower():
    kittens = kitties.lower()
    print(kittens) 

isupper()

This method tests if a string is all upper case.

kitties = 'I LIKE KITTIES'

if kitties.isupper():
    print(kitties, ' is upper case')
else:
    print(kitties, ' is not upper case')

upper()

This method converts the string to upper case.

kitties = 'i like kitties'

if not kitties.isupper():
    cat = kitties.upper()
    print(cat)

isnumeric()

Checks if the strings is a numbers. This is useful if you want to convert a string to an int.

number_str = '3'

if number_str.isnumeric():
    number = int(number_str)

format()

This is useful for using a generic string that allows you to replace {} with values.

fm = 'I have {} kitties'
print(fm.format(3')
# Prints: I have 3 kitties