We've already seen strings in previous examples, we will define it now.

Strings are a sequence of alpha-numeric characters.

A string can be empty, or contain any amount of letters or numbers. The term character is used to express something that is either a letter or number, and is part of the terminology that is common in the programming space. For example if we write just "h" then this is a character. If we write "hi" then this is a string, composed of the two characters "h" and "i".

Combining Strings

One of the nice features Python naturally provides for strings is the capability to combine them together - a process usually referred to as concatenation. We can concatenate multiple strings together using just the plus sign +.

When combining strings, spaces won't magically appear, it's up to the developer to make sure the combined string makes sense.

Casting from String to Int

We learned how to convert between int and floats by casting them in the Datatypes - Integers and Floats lesson. Since this is such a useful thing to be able to do. Let's learn how we can do the same kind of thing with strings.

It is worth mentioning int can only convert strings that are ints to ints. If we try any of the following, we will receive an error.

int("5.1") int("5a")

ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10

Like many other types, there's much more to strings, such as searching for a substrings, changing the case, and other ways to manipulate them, which we will leave for the intermediate level of this path. For now, lets move on to lists.