
We’ll first look at the len() method which can get the length of any data type that is a sequence, whether ordered or unordered, including strings, lists, tuples, and dictionaries. Like other sequential data types, strings can be counted through several methods. This can be useful for limiting the number of characters we would like to accept within a user-input form, or comparing strings. While we are thinking about the relevant index numbers that correspond to characters within strings, it is worth going through some of the methods that count strings or return index numbers. The whitespace character is printed in this example.īy specifying the third parameter of the Python slice syntax, you are indicating the stride of the substring that you are pulling from the original string. startindexpython) and one for the back of the substring (e.g. Additionally, by having a stride of -2 we are skipping every other letter of the reversed string: To perform the splitting, we’ll need to track a couple indices: one for the front of each substring (e.g. In this example, ss, we are dealing with the entirety of the original string as no index numbers are included in the parameters, and reversing the string through the negative stride. Like the list data type that has items that correspond to an index number, each of a string’s characters also correspond to an index number, starting with the index number 0.įor the string Sammy Shark! the index breakdown is like this: If you don’t have a programming environment set up, you can refer to the installation and setup guides for a local programming environment or for a programming environment on your server appropriate for your operating system (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, etc.) How Strings are Indexed You should have Python 3 installed and a programming environment set up on your computer or server. Remember Python counting starts at 0 and ends at n-1. The index of the slice is specified in start:stop.


This tutorial will guide you through accessing strings through indexing, slicing them through their character sequences, and go over some counting and character location methods. To pull out a section or slice of an array, the colon operator : is used when calling the index. Because a string is a sequence, it can be accessed in the same ways that other sequence-based data types are, through indexing and slicing. The Python string data type is a sequence made up of one or more individual characters that could consist of letters, numbers, whitespace characters, or symbols.
