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{{{ show the welcome slide }}}
Welcome to this tutorial on manipulating strings.
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In this tutorial we shall learn to manipulate strings, specifically
slicing and reversing them, or replacing characters, converting from
upper to lower case and vice-versa
#[punch: reversed returns an iterator. should we still teach it?]
We have an ``ipython`` shell open, in which we are going to work,
through out this session.
Let us consider a simple problem, and learn how to slice strings and
get sub-strings.
Let's say the variable ``week`` has the list of the names of the days
of the week.
::
week = ["sun", "mon", "tue", "wed", "thu", "fri", "sat"]
Now given a string ``s``, we should be able to check if the string is a
valid name of a day of the week or not.
::
s = saturday
``s`` could be in any of the forms --- sat, saturday, Sat, Saturday,
SAT, SATURDAY. We shall now be solving the problem only for the forms,
sat and saturday. We shall solve it for the other forms, at the end of
the tutorial.
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So, we need to check if the first three characters of the given string
exists in the variable ``week``.
As, with any of the string data-types, strings can be sliced into
sub-strings. To get the first three characters of s, we say,
::
s[0:3]
Note that, we are slicing the string from the index 0 to index 3, 3
not included.
As we already know, the last element of the string can be accessed
using ``s[-1]``.
%%1%% Pause the video here and obtain the sub-string excluding the
first and last characters from the string.
::
s[1:-1]
gives the a substring of s, without the first and the last
characters.
::
s = saturday
s[:3]
Now, we just check if that substring is present in the variable
``week``.
::
s[:3] in week
Let us now consider the problem of finding out if a given string is
palindromic or not. First of all, a palindromic string is a string
that remains same even when it has been reversed.
Let the string given be ``malayalam``.
::
s = "malayalam"
Now, we need to compare this string with it's reverse.
Again, we will use a technique common to all sequence data-types,
[::-1]
So, we obtain the reverse of s, by simply saying,
::
s[::-1]
Now, to check if the string is ``s`` is palindromic, we say
::
s == s[::-1]
As, expected, we get ``True``.
Now, if the string we are given is ``Malayalam`` instead of
``malayalam``, the above comparison would return a False. So, we will
have to convert the string to all lower case or all upper case, before
comparing. Python provides methods, ``s.lower`` and ``s.upper`` to
achieve this.
Let's try it out.
::
s = "Malayalam"
s.upper()
s
s.lower()
s.lower() == s.lower()[::-1]
Note that these methods, do not change the original string, but return
a new string.
a%% %% Pause the video here, and finish the problem of checking if
``s`` is a valid name of a day of the week and then resume the
video. Change the solution to this problem, to include forms like,
SAT, SATURDAY, Saturday and Sat.
::
s.lower()[:3] in week
We just convert any input string to lower case and then check if it is
present in the list ``week``.
Now, let us consider another problem. We often encounter e-mail id's
which have @ and periods replaced with text, something like
info[at]fossee[dot]in. We now wish to get back proper e-mail
addresses.
Let's say the variable email has the email address.
::
email = "info[at]fossee[dot]in"
Now, we first replace the ``[at]`` with the ``@``, using the replace
method of strings.
::
email = email.replace("[at]", "@")
print email
%%1%% Pause the video here and replace the ``[dot]`` with ``.`` and then
resume the video.
::
email = email.replace("[dot]", ".")
print email
That brings us to the end of the tutorial.
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In this tutorial, we have learnt how to get substrings, reverse
strings and a few useful methods, namely upper, lower and replace.
Thank You!