Strings basically just refer to all of the pieces of text used in Python aside from the actual code or commands themselves. For example, if we want to print someone's name, we would write their name as a string, as it isn't a functional part of the text but rather just a piece of text. The thing which turns a text into a string is the fact that it is written between quotation marks unlike regular code.

"Hello World!" # is a string

country = "Spain"

print(type(country))

Output:

<class 'str'>

We can put strings inside other strings by using single quotes and double quotes together. So if we want to have a string of a dialogue where we have to use double quotation marks inside of the string, we can just use single quotes when forming the string, and vice versa.

line = 'Emma asked him "What are you doing tonight?"'

# if we had put double quotation marks (" ") to form the string there would have been an error, a broken string.

In cases where we have to make a paragraph or another long text a string, we would use three quotation marks to form it.

Strings come with several different string methods, which allow us to modify our strings in cases where necessary. Python has lots of these string methods, however, below are the most handy ones:

string = "cake"

# count method - counts how many times something is in a string

count = string.count("a")

print(count) # Will print: 1

# lowercasing text - .lower() method

lower_string = string.lower()

print(lower_string) # Will print: cake

# uppercasing text - .upper() method

upper_string = string.upper()

print(upper_string) # Will print: CAKE

# capitalizing only the first letter of a string - .title()

capitalized = string.title()

print(capitalized) # Will print: Cake

# capitalizing the first letter of each word within the string - .capitalize()

string2 = "good morning"

capitalized = string2.capitalize()

print(capitalized) # Will print: Good Morning

print(string2.title()) # Will print: Good morning

# checking if a string is all capitalized - .isupper()

all_capitalized = string.isupper()

print(all_capitalized) # Will print: False

# checking if a string is all lowercase - .islower()

all_lowercase = string.islower()

print(all_lowercase) # Will print: True

# checking if a string is all numbers - isdigit()

all_numbers = string.isdigit()

print(all_numbers) # Will print: False

# checking if a string only contains letters or numbers - .isalnum()

letters_or_numbers = string.isalnum()

print(letters_or_numbers) # Will print: True

One particularly important one is the .len() method, which determines how many characters are in a string. This also includes spaces and punctuation.

print(len("Happy Birthday!"))

Output:

15