Strings are Arrays

Like many other popular programming languages, strings in Python are arrays of bytes representing unicode characters.

However, Python does not have a character data type, a single character is simply a string with a length of 1.

Square brackets can be used to access elements of the string.

Example

Get the character at position 1 (remember that the first character has the position 0):

a = "Hello, World!"

print(a[1])

Slicing

You can return a range of characters by using the slice syntax.

Specify the start index and the end index, separated by a colon, to return a part of the string.

Example

Get the characters from position 2 to position 5 (not included):

b = "Hello, World!"

print(b[2:5])

Negative Indexing

Use negative indexes to start the slice from the end of the string:

Example

Get the characters from position 5 to position 1, starting the count from the end of the string:

b = "Hello, World!"

print(b[-5:-2])

String Length

To get the length of a string, use the len() function.

Example

The len() function returns the length of a string:

a = "Hello, World!"

print(len(a))