Skip to main content

What are Strings? A Beginner's Guide Into Programming Strings in Python

 

What is the meaning of a string in coding?

Introduction

Hello there, coders! This was definitely one of the weirdest concepts I had to understand when I was learning to code. 

It is so simple, but I spent an entire evening understand strings! It was very embarrassing, but at least I know now! 

To hopefully regain my pride, I'm going to explain what strings are in programming as a beginner.

What even are strings?


Strings are data that you can print out. It's basically text. You might be confused if 9 is a string or an integer (number), but you can just change it!

You can type in your code editor to turn a certain variable or a number into a string, in our case 9, by using the str() function. You can put anything in there and it will turn into something you can print out! You can't perform math on the string '9' though.

My Experience

Aside from the usual data types, I was a bit stumped when I reached the string functions. There were just so many string functions, like the lower, upper, and especially the slicing. 

The way I just got better at understanding strings and just the string functions in general, was just practice. Practice, practice, and practice.

(p.s. strings are present in every programming language!)

Conclusion

Today, we found out that strings are just text that can't be added and every other data type can be turned into a string by using the str() function.

There are many other types of string functions that might seem useless but it can be used to extract data from internet forums, documents and the entire internet! 

For example, in this code (in the python for everybody course), I made this code to extract a number from a string!

A code snippet

Here's the official python string functions documentation if you guys ever need it: 
https://docs.python.org/3/library/string.html

Man, I don't wanna learn these when I become better, but I'll take my time!


By the way, I have so much more beginner-focused python blog posts! Be sure to check 'em out!

How did you all get stuck on strings? And how did you get over it? Comment down below!

and with that,
signing off,
Stewie

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beginning

  Coding was always something I was interested in. Introduction I used to be super interested in coding as a kid, because who wouldn't want to make games, create web pages? I obviously signed up for coding tuition when I was around 10, and just could not keep up at all. The teacher was fine, but I guess I just got bored trying to understand and remember the "functions". Recently, I decided to change this, by trying to learn coding again. I still have some basic knowledge for coding, for example loops, conditionals, data types, but other than that, I just forgot everything. After this, I found this incredible website called freecodecamp.org . If you're learning to code, which I think you are doing since you're reading this, you'll probably find this website to be incredibly useful. Other than that, I realized that, "I could probably help some future coding beginners if they saw a blog from a person learning to code." and I set up this blog. I really h
2 comments
Read more

Python Lists: Beginner Python Lists Introduction and A Beginner's Experiences Learning It

  Apparently, we're doing data structures here! Introduction Hello there, coders! Today, we're talking about lists! I'm also going to be recalling my experience learning about lists after so many minutes. I was actually supposed to post this much earlier but because of the light cutouts coupled with my english tuition, AND my headphones not working, I couldn't start this blog post. Thankfully my lights came on a bit earlier than usual! What are Lists? They're a, well, list! It's very well named. It's stored in a variable with square brackets [] and separated by commas, and you can put many data types in it!  This basically just makes it a better way of storing data, instead of using normal brackets to store only one data type.  What can we do with lists? You can modify lists even after they were made, or in other words, mutable.  You can use many functions to add data to the back of the list, remove data, add data in the middle of the list, and you can sort
Post a Comment
Read more