What are strings in python?

Assigning string to a variable  

 You can easily assign a string to a variable. This makes the accessing easier and faster. 

You can use ‘+’ to join two strings. This is called string concatenation.  

For example:  

str1 = ‘This is a beautiful place’ 

str2 = ‘We are here to help!‘ 

print (str1) 

print (str2) 

print (str1 +’. ‘+ str2) 

Here’s the output  

/////////////////////// image ///////////////////////////////////

Assessing String elements  

The elements of the strings in Python can easily be accessed using an index.  

The first character of the string has an index 0 and followed by 1,2,3.. and so on. 

You can even access the string from the back using index as -1, -2 etc.  

A string element with index [-1] means the last element of the string. 

Let’s understand the same using a string “TELGURUS”. 

• First, we’ll create a variable that holds this string value. 
• Next, we can access the characters using index placed in square brackets.  

str1 = “TEL GURUS” 

To access the first element of the string we use,  

str1[0] will give T  

and second element,  

str[1] will give E 

To access the elements from the end, we use negative numbers. 

str1[-1] will give S,  str1[-2] will give U. 

Length of a string  

To get the length can be calculated by using a len() function. 

len(<string name>) will give you a number that states the length of the string. 

Slicing   

 This helps you to slice a string and obtain a substring from it. 

Syntax followed is  

string_name [start_index: end_index] 

Here start_index is included but end_index is not included.  

Let’s apply all the concepts learnt above in a program. 

str1 = ‘TEL GURUS’ 

print (“The First Letter of string is  ” + str1[0]) 

print (“The Second Letter of String is ” + str1[1]) 

print (“The last letter is ” + str1[-1]) 

print (“The brand name is “+ str1[0:3]) 

print (“The length of string is “+ str(len(str1))) 

Here’s the output  

/////////////////////// image ///////////////////////////////////

If you look carefully at the program we have used another function str() in the last line while calculating the length of the string.   

It is done because, the len() function will return a number and on concatenating a string and a number, the interpreter will give an error.   

The number needs to be converted into string so as to make it eligible for concatenation.  

So, here comes str() function that converts any number into a string format.  

Escape sequences  

Generally, you aren’t able to print a string with the quotes within the quotes. For that, there are some escape sequences. 

• Using a backlash “\” enables the interpreter to take quotes into account. 
• “\n” is used for new line. 
• “\t” is used for giving a tab space. 
• “\b” is used as backspace. 

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