26 FIRST STEPS
Working with strings
Coders use the word “string” for any data
Y 0
made up of a sequence of letters or other P T H N
characters. Words and sentences are
stored as strings. Almost all programs use
strings at some point. Every character that A string is simply a
sequence of characters.
you can type on your keyboard, and even
those you can’t, can be stored in a string. The quote marks show that
the variable contains a string.
1 Strings in variables
Strings can be put into variables. Type this
>>> name = 'Ally Alien'
code into the shell window. It assigns the >>> print(name)
string 'Ally Alien' to the variable name Ally Alien
and then displays it. Strings must always have
quotation marks at the beginning and end.
Hit the enter/return
Remember the
key to print the string.
quote marks.
2 Combining strings
Variables become really useful when you
>>> name = 'Ally Alien'
combine them to make new variables. If you >>> greeting = 'Welcome to Earth, '
add two strings together, you can store the >>> message = greeting + name
combination in a new variable. Try this out.
>>> print(message)
Welcome to Earth, Ally Alien
EXPERT TIPS
Length of a string The + symbol
joins one string
The quote marks to another.
You can use a handy trick, len(), to aren’t shown when
count the number of characters in a string you print a string.
(including the spaces). The command
len() is an example of what coders call a
function. (You’ll use lots of functions in this
book.) To find out how many characters He doesn’t have
there are in 'Welcome to Earth, Ally a clue!
Alien', type the line below into the Take me to your
leader...
shell once you’ve created the string, then
hit enter/return.
>>> len(message)
28
The number of
characters counted
