Manipulating text with strings is a cornerstone of any programming language, including Python. It can be simple and complicated at the same time. Let’s learn the basics of Python strings with the example below.
Python Strings
Python uses strings (or, more specifically, str objects) to handle textual data. These objects are also a sequence type (like lists or tuples) but tailored for representing sequences of Unicode code points.
String Literals
String literals in Python can be written in several ways, depending on which quotation mark you want to enclose your strings: single quotes, double quotes, and triple quotes.
These strings represent the same sequence of characters in Python:
>>> single = 'learnshareit'
>>> double = "learnshareit"
>>> triple_single = '''learnshareit'''
>>> triple_double = """learnshareit"""
You can check their contents with the equality operator:
>>> single == double
True
>>> double == triple_single
True
>>> triple_single == triple_double
True
While most of the time, you can use single and double quotes to enclose a string interchangeably, you shouldn’t mix them. This would lead to a syntactical error:
>>> print("this is a mixed quote')
File "<stdin>", line 1
print("this is a mixed quote')
^
SyntaxError: unterminated string literal (detected at line 1)
There are times when you need to have quotation marks inside your strings, such as for marking the contraction of “it is” or “do not”. Using single quotes in those situations will produce errors:
>>> a = 'I'm Tom'
File "<stdin>", line 1
a = 'I'm Tom'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Python interprets the apostrophe here as the enclosing quotation mark of your string. As a result, your sequence of characters is treated as an invalid string literal.
You should use double quotes to embed the apostrophe:
>>> a = "I'm Tom"
Likewise, you can use single quotes to embed double quotes, such as when quoting direct speech:
>>> b = 'He said "Do it"'
Triple quoted literals can’t only contain both single and double quotes but also allow you to span them to multiple lines. All the whitespace characters will be preserved in the returned str object, including trailing or leading spaces:
>>> print("""He said "I'm done"
... "Okay", I responded""")
He said "I'm done"
"Okay", I responded
str()
In addition to quotation marks, the str() constructor can also be used to create strings. What it does is convert an input object into a string. In these examples, str() creates the string version of a string literal, a number
>>> str(4)
'4'
>>> str('learnshareit')
'learnshareit'
If you don't provide any object, str() returns an empty string.
>>> str()
''
Escape Characters
Python strings support the backslash (\) escape characters. Using them in the middle of a string gives the next character special meaning. You can put them before a single or double quote to tell Python not to treat them as a string delimiter.
>>> a = 'I\'m Tom'
>>> print(a)
I'm Tom
Another common use of escape characters is to break a line and start a new one with \n:
>>> a = 'Hello\nWelcome to LearnShareIT'
>>> print(a)
Hello
Welcome to LearnShareIT
Sequence Operations
You can use common sequence operations on string objects in the same way you invoke them on other sequence types like lists.
For instance, you can check for the existence of a substring in another string with the “in” keyword:
>>> a = 'learnshareit'
>>> 'it' in a
True
This keyword also works with a for loop, helping you iterate through a string:
>>> a = 'Tom'
>>> for i in a:
... print(i)
...
T
o
m
The plus (+) operator can be used to concatenate two strings, creating another string:
>>> b = '.com'
>>> a + b
'learnshareit.com'
You can access a character or a substring with indexing and slicing:
>>> a = 'learnshareit'
>>> a[1]
'e'
>>> a[2:5]
'arn'
The length of a string is returned by the len() function:
>>> len(a)
12
You can even find the number of occurrences of a substring in a string with the count() method:
>>> a.count('e')
2
Additional methods
In addition to the sequence operations above, str objects also come with several methods of their own.
split()
The built-in split() method breaks a string into substrings based on a certain separator. It returns a list whose items are those smaller strings:
>>> a = 'Tom,Donald,Noah,Oliver'
>>> a.split(',')
['Tom', 'Donald', 'Noah', 'Oliver']
If you don’t give the split() method any delimiter, it will treat consecutive whitespace as a single separator:
>>> a = 'Tom Donald Noah Oliver'
>>> a.split()
['Tom', 'Donald', 'Noah', 'Oliver']
join()
This method has the opposite purpose of split() – it concatenates multiple strings into one.
It is important to note that join() joins all the strings in an iterable while using the string you run it on as the separator. For instance, this example shows you can join names in a list together, separated by using a comma and a space as the:
>>> names = ['Tom', 'Donald', 'Noah', 'Oliver']
>>> (', ').join(names)
'Tom, Donald, Noah, Oliver'
replace()
For simple string substitution, use the replace() method. Its syntax is as follows:
replace(old, new, count)
Remember that strings are immutable, so replace() can’t modify the original string. Instead, it creates a copy of the string and replaces all the occurrences of old with new. The count parameter is optional, determining how many occurrences of old should be removed and replaced with new.
>>> a = 'Copyright 2014-2021'
>>> b = a.replace('2021', '2022')
>>> print(a)
Copyright 2014-2021
>>> print(b)
Copyright 2014-2022
Notice how the string is still intact, even when you have run replace() on it.
strip()
It is common to remove leading or trailing characters from a space, typically whitespace. In fact, the strip() method removes whitespace characters from the beginning and the end of a string by default when no argument is given:
>>> a = ' learnshareit '
>>> a.strip()
'learnshareit'
To strip characters only on the left or right of the string, use lstrip() and rstrip()
>>> a.lstrip()
'learnshareit '
>>> a.rstrip()
' learnshareit'
You can also tell strip() to remove certain characters:
>>> a = 'learnshareit.com'
>>> a.strip('cmowz.')
'learnshareit'
Letter Case Methods
There are plenty of methods you can use to change the letter case of a string object. Remember that none of them actually affects the original string. They just carry out the operations on a copy of it and return the result.
The capitalize() method returns a copy of the string where only the first word is capitalized while the rest of them is lowercase:
>>> a = 'goOd morNiNg'
>>> a.capitalize()
'Good morning'
To capitalize all the words within a string, use title():
>>> a.title()
'Good Morning'
This is how you can convert all characters to uppercase or lowercase:
>>> a.upper()
'GOOD MORNING'
>>> a.lower()
'good morning'
Tutorials about Python Strings
You can learn more about strings in Python in the articles below.
- Split a string by comma in Python
- Check if an object is iterable in Python
- Split a string every nth character in Python
- Split a string by whitespace in python
- Split a string with multiple delimiters in python
- Find index of last occurrence of substring in Python String
- Get the length of a String in Python
- Remove multiple spaces from a string in Python
- Remove \xa0 from a string in Python
- Concatenate a String and an Integer in Python
- Convert float to string with N digits precision in Python
- Remove everything after a character in a string in Python
- Strip the HTML tags from a string in Python
- Remove the HTML tags from a String in Python
- Split a string on the first occurrence in Python
- Split string on last occurrence of delimiter in Python
- Convert a String to an Enum in Python
- Convert an Enum to a String in Python
- Sort a list of tuples by the second element in Python
- Ways To Split A String By Tab In Python
- Join The Keys Of A Dictionary Into A String In Python
- How To Replace Multiple Spaces With A Single Space In Python
- Remove Leading And Trailing Zeros From A String In Python
- How To Remove Everything Before A Character In A String In Python
- Find index of first occurrence of substring in Python
- Add spaces between the characters of a string in Python
- How to convert None to an Empty string in Python
- Convert a string to a tuple without splitting in Python
- Remove URLs from Text in Python
- How to add space between variables in Python
- Remove \x00 from a string in Python
- Get everything after last slash in a string in Python
- Remove \r\n from a string or list of strings in Python
- Split a string without removing the delimiter in Python
- Join the elements of a Set into a string in Python
- Add double quotes around a variable in Python
- Remove zero width space character from string in Python
- Split a string into text and number in Python
- How to compare a string with an Enum in Python
- ValueError: substring not found in Python
- How to add quotes to a string in Python
- Remove character from a string by index in Python
- Join a list of strings wrapping each string in quotes in Python
- Split a string into words and punctuation in Python
- Add single quotes around a variable in Python
- Split a string only on the first Space in Python
- Split a string on uppercase letters in Python
- Remove a list of words from a string in Python
- Split a string by unknown number of spaces in Python
- Add a space between two strings in Python
- Split a string by backslash in Python
- Check if a string is an Integer or a Float in Python
- Split string by space and preserve quoted strings in Python
- Extract strings between quotes in Python
- Split a string into fixed size chunks in Python
- Remove everything before last occurrence of character in Python
- Split a string and get the last element in Python
- Split a string, reverse it and join it back in Python
- How to split a string without spaces in Python
- Join a list of integers into a string in Python
- Split text by empty line in Python
- Join multiple Strings with possibly None values in Python
- Add a certain number of spaces to a String in Python
- Sum the digits in a string in Python
- How to print a String and a Variable in Python
Summary
At first glance, Python strings seem to be simple. But you can actually use them in several ways. There are many other operations you can use with strings as well, which you can learn more about on our website.

My name is Robert. I have a degree in information technology and two years of expertise in software development. I’ve come to offer my understanding on programming languages. I hope you find my articles interesting.
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