Understanding how to navigate and manipulate strings is a crucial skill for any Python programmer. In this article, we’ll explore the concepts of string indexing and slicing, which are essential for accessing and extracting specific parts of strings.
By the end, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to efficiently work with strings in Python.
Understanding String Indexing
In Python, each character in a string is assigned a unique index, starting from 0 for the first character, 1 for the second character, and so on. Negative indices are also supported, with -1 representing the last character, -2 representing the second-to-last character, and so forth. Let’s illustrate this with some examples:
# Define a string
word = "Python"
# Accessing individual characters
print(word[0]) # Output: P
print(word[2]) # Output: t
print(word[-1]) # Output: n
Slicing Strings
String slicing allows you to extract substrings from a larger string by specifying a range of indices. The syntax for slicing is string[start:end:step]
, where start
is the index of the first…