Strings

A string is a sequence of characters — anything you can type: letters, digits, spaces and symbols such as commas, dashes or exclamation marks. Every piece of text a program holds is a string, even something that looks like a number such as "07700 900123", because the quote marks make it text rather than a value to do arithmetic with.

Strings turn up everywhere: a player name on a scoreboard, an answer typed at an input() prompt, a message printed to the screen. The characters are kept in order, so a string can be counted, copied in part or rebuilt.

What string manipulation means

String manipulation means working with the characters inside a string instead of treating the whole thing as one lump. A program rarely wants text exactly as it was typed — it may need to count the characters, pull out part of a code, glue two names together, ignore capital letters or turn a letter into its code.

Tools you will not need

Python has many more string methods, such as split(), replace(), find() and count(). These are not required here and questions will not depend on them, because the same jobs — counting how often a letter appears in a word, checking whether a booking reference contains a certain letter, or building a display label from parts of a title — can be done with the tools in the table.

# a string can hold letters, digits, spaces and symbols
fixture = "Match 3: Kestrels vs Hawks!"
print(fixture)
print(len(fixture))
print(fixture.upper())

Output:

Match 3: Kestrels vs Hawks!
27
MATCH 3: KESTRELS VS HAWKS!