What Are Strings In Python?

In this article, we will look at Strings as a built-in data type in Python and some methods that you can perform on a string

It is important to know what strings are and how you can use them when writing your programs

An understanding of arrays in Python or any other language will be helpful if you want to understand this article

Strings

In Python, a string is a sequence of characters enclosed in either single quotes (' '), double quotes (" ") or triple quotes (''' ''')

Strings are one of the built-in primitive data types in Python and are used to manipulate how the computer prints and handles text data. For example:

# Single quotes string
print('hello world')

# Double quotes string
print("It's a good day")

# Tripple quotes string
print('''Multi
Line
String''')

But under the hood, A string in Python is a sequence of characters, or an array of characters, where each character is indexed by its position in the string.

Which allows us to perform array-like methods to manipulate the data in the string. As we can see here:

1. String Indexing: You can access individual characters in a string using the square brackets notation [i], and the 'i' represents the index which starts from 0 for the first character and increases subsequently for the rest. For example:

    # String Indexing
    my_string = "hello world"
   
    first_char = my_string[0] # h
    second_char = my_string[1] # e
    last_char = my_string[-1] # d
   

2. String Slicing: You can get a substring from a string using slicing, this allows you to specify the range of indices. you use a colon : to separate the start and end index. The start index is inclusive while the end index is excluded. For example:

    my_string = "hello world"
    substring = my_string[2:-2] # "llo wor"
   

3. String Iteration: A sting being an array of characters allows us to iterate through each character using a for loop. For example:

    my_string = "hello"
   
    for char in my_string:
        print(char) # This will print each character in my_string on individual line in your terminal
   

4. String Length: You can find the length of a string by using a global function len() to get the number of characters in that string. For example:

    my_string = "hello"
   
    length = len(my_string) # 5
   

Conclusion

We have talked about strings and how they are a sequence of characters, and this allows us to perform array-like methods on the string.

So when next you're writing code, see your strings as an array that stores a sequence of characters.