Sequences of characters with operations like slicing and searching.
Strings are sequences of characters, usually immutable. Operations: concatenation, slicing, search, split, join, formatting, regular expressions. Encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, Unicode) decides how characters map to bytes. Building long strings in loops should use buffers or join.
'engineer'[0:3] returns 'eng'.
Strings carry text in programs, so handling them correctly matters for user interfaces, file formats and data cleaning.
Sequences of characters with operations like slicing and searching.
Strings carry text in programs, so handling them correctly matters for user interfaces, file formats and data cleaning.
Immutable strings are safer to share, and operations return new strings, which avoids surprises when a value is used in several places.
Forgetting to handle different encodings or whitespace, which causes comparisons and parsing to fail on real input.
Typical applications include parsing a comma-separated line of sensor data, searching a document for a keyword and formatting a date for a report.
Study "Arrays and lists" first (topic 8 of 104 in Software & Computing). It covers the groundwork this topic builds on.
Unicode code points. Escape sequences. Regex for patterns.
'engineer'[0:3] returns 'eng'.
The next topic is "Recursion", which builds directly on this one.
It is classed as Beginner in Software & Computing (topic 9 of 104). It is an entry-level topic. It relies only on basic school mathematics and the ideas introduced earlier in this discipline.
Want to practise? Open the interactive course for quick checks, quizzes, simulations and progress tracking.