Python - Strings

Strings are immutable - once created cannot be changed - in the background every declaration creates pyStringObject

In the interactive interpreter, the output string is enclosed in quotes and special characters are escaped with backslashes. While this might sometimes look different from the input (the enclosing quotes could change), the two strings are equivalent. The string is enclosed in double quotes if the string contains a single quote and no double quotes, otherwise it is enclosed in single quotes. The print statement produces a more readable output, by omitting the enclosing quotes and by printing escaped and special characters:


String literals can span multiple lines. One way is using triple-quotes: """...""" or '''...'''. End of lines are automatically included in the string, but it’s possible to prevent this by adding a \ at the end of the line. The following example:

If you don’t want characters prefaced with \ to be interpreted as special characters, you can use raw strings by adding an r before the first quote:

>>> print 'C:\some\name'  # here \n means newline!
C:\some
ame
>>> print r'C:\some\name'  # note the r before the quote
C:\some\name

String literals can span multiple lines. One way is using triple-quotes: """...""" or '''...'''. End of lines are automatically included in the string, but it’s possible to prevent this by adding a \ at the end of the line. The following example:

print """\
Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to
"""

produces the following output (note that the initial newline is not included):

Usage: thingy [OPTIONS]
     -h                        Display this usage message
     -H hostname               Hostname to connect to

Strings can be indexed (subscripted), with the first character having index 0. There is no separate character type; a character is simply a string of size one:

>>> word = 'Python'
>>> word[0]  # character in position 0
'P'
>>> word[5]  # character in position 5
'n'

Indices may also be negative numbers, to start counting from the right:

>>> word[-1]  # last character
'n'
>>> word[-2]  # second-last character
'o'
>>> word[-6]
'P'

Note that since -0 is the same as 0, negative indices start from -1.