2.6 Strings (Deep-Dive) Part 1 - IP
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Beginner
Video Transcription
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>> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to intro to
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Python here on Cybrary OnDemand.
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I, as always, I'm your instructor Joe Perry.
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If you're watching this video,
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it means that you have completed lab assignment.
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Whether you did it through next tech or
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spectacular partner organization or you did
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it through just the assigned document.
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Either way, the important thing
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is that you've gotten a little bit of
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experience programming,
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gotten your hands-on Python,
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and really gotten to actually write some code.
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If you haven't done the lab yet,
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I very highly recommend you go back and do that.
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I, as a programmer, I never really got into programming.
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I never really understood it until
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I actually started to write the code myself.
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As we go through strings,
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numbers, lists, and dictionaries,
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which are these next few lessons rather,
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it's going to be a lot easier for you to understand
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if you've gotten comfortable
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writing your own Python code.
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No further ado, less than six objectives,
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we're going to learn about string methods.
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We're going to talk about what methods are briefly,
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we're going to understand, we're going to use
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string slicing,
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and we're going to learn to take input from the user,
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and then we're going to learn to
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write better print statements.
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This lesson is going to be divided into two videos.
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The first is going to be about string
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methods and string slicing.
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The second one is going to be about
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the input-output functions that we just discussed.
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String methods. What are method?
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Well, if you remember from our very earliest video,
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we talked about this dir function
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and what that did is it showed us all of
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the objects are all the functions and all of
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the names that are defined in our current space.
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We can use that to understand
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what methods are a little bit more
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effectively by creating ourselves a variable,
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[NOISE] x equals hello,
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world, dir x.
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You see we have all these underscored names.
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We're not going to worry about those right now,
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those are internal and not really for our use.
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But we look down here,
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we see these names in the list
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that don't have underscores.
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For example, we see the ones that I'm going to focus on
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right now, lower and upper.
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What these are, are methods.
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Methods are functions that are
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attached to a given object.
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Then our intermediate and advanced Python classes,
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we spend a whole bunch of time
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on classes and objects in Python.
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We talked about object orientation.
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In that time, you're going to learn under the hood
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a lot more about what methods and attributes are,
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and what they do,
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and what they're for, and all that thing.
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For now, just understand that methods are
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functions which are attached to an object.
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Let's clear our screen here a little bit.
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Remember, we have x, which is our hello, world,
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that first-ever script we ever wrote,
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hello, world, and then we're going to do x.upper.
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This is the way you use methods
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that are attached to a given object.
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If we're trying to use the upper method from x,
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we do x.upper and then we call that function.
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There is no arguments to the upper function,
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we just call it and you
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see that it's going to print HELLO,
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WORLD, in all caps.
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Now for those of you who've never written
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assembly or C code,
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it's hard to describe to you
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how much more work it would
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take to do this in those languages.
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I addressed that because upper and
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lower were two of the first functions I ever
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learned in Python and it absolutely blew my mind.
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I was amazed at the idea that you would get so
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much done so easily with these methods.
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That's how you use string methods,
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and we're going to talk about a few more of them.
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One of the ways that you can use lower,
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which is the companion function
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to upper really effectively,
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is if you have [NOISE] a list that
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you're trying to compare against some inputs.
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For example, we're going to have this list of Joe,
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Jimmy, Bob, and Tim, [NOISE] fix that.
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Then we're going to have some input,
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which we're just going to call our input variable.
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[NOISE] You can see there that,
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and normally you would get this from your user,
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but we haven't discussed that just yet,
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so we're not going to worry about it,
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the input variable doesn't exactly
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match the first name in this list.
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It is the same name,
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but the input has a capital letter in it.
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What you can do is for i in name list if i.
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[NOISE] Remember double equal in is are similar.
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This is one of the cases in which you're going to find
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a difference if you're performing
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methods against your string,
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you're going to want to use double equal instead of is.
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Again, the concepts of identity are really
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part of object orientation,
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so we will discuss those in later classes.
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For now, just understand
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that if we're making use of a method,
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it is safer to use the double equal.
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If i equals input [NOISE]
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variable.lower, print found it.
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Now hopefully this is going to work for us.
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Sure enough, it found name we were looking for because of
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the fact that input
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[NOISE] variable.lower looks like that.
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Now, if we were just to do for i name list,
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if i equals equals input variable,
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[NOISE] not what I meant to do.
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[NOISE] You can see
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it will never print found it because of
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the fact that those two names don't exactly match.
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That's the concept of string methods.
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There are a whole bunch of them here.
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As I said, you can find them by doing dir x,
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I highly recommend you play around with them,
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things like isdecimal or isdigit.
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You can find a lot of useful information
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just by messing with those methods.
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Now, however, we're going to
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move on to the next concept.
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For that, we're going to have our
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first string here, hello, world.
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What we're talking about now is called
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string slicing or string indexing.
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Now you may remember from very
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briefly when we were talking
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about lists and dictionaries,
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we talked about how you could address
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specific items in a list by giving the index.
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The index is just the count of that letter,
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from zero up to the end of the string.
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For example, H here is index 0,
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e is index 1,
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l is index 2,
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the next l is index 3,
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so on, and so forth.
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But you can use that to address the individual letters.
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If for example, we just wanted to print the first letter,
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we can do x 0
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and you're going to address it the exact
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same way you would with a list.
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X 0 is going to print the letter
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H. But you can also print chunks of these letters,
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or chunks of these strings at a time.
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You would do that in this case by doing x,
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we'll say the index of the first letter
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we want to print is zero and
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the index of the last letter we want to print is four.
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Now, this isn't going to work
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exactly like what you would think.
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You would initially assume this is going to print
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H-E-L-L and then O,
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because 0-4 is five letters.
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Instead, however, it's going to print H-E-L-L.
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The reason for that
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is because of the fact that just like with range,
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indexes are not inclusive.
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If you wanted to print the first five letters,
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you would actually be doing index of 0-5.
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The colon here is how you identify
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all of the numbers between zero and five.
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You see here that it will now print hello.
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But you can also start from different places.
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You can, for example, [NOISE] do print x from 3-4.
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In that case, you're only going to print
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one letter because remember four is not included,
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so that is functionally the same thing as
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just doing x of 3.
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You could do 3-5,
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which will actually give you two letters.
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You can also do something a little bit trickier.
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For example, you might do 5-3,
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in which case you're not going to get anything
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because of the fact that you have
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to add a piece of information to this index to the Slax.
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That is something we call a step.
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The way you would actually want to
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make this work if you're trying
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to print backward from 5-3,
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is you're going to add another colon,
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and that is going to tell it how to step through.
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In this case, we're going to say negative 1.
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You see here it's going to print,o which because that's
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the fourth index and then the third index.
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Now, I'll demonstrate to you a little bit more
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easily without showing other values in it.
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X:: negative 1.
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This is a very useful shorthand that says print
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this string backward because
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word's starting at basically no given index
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ending without a specific given index,
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and then all you're going to do is
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step backward with negative one.
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This is a shortcut to say
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print the whole string backward.
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You can use different steps
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to increment by different amounts.
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For example, if you wanted to
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do all of the letters in the string,
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but only every second letter you would step
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by two and you see
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you're only going to get half the letters.
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You can do all of the letters step
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by negative 3, excuse me.
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Those are all the different ways
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that you can slice a string.
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In our lab,
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you're going to spend a whole bunch of time slicing it in
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every possible direction and learn about that a lot.
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But for now, we're going to leave it
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there and you're just going to understand that
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that is what string slicing and
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those were string methods before that.
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That's all we discussed in this video
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or the concept of methods,
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string methods, and string slicing.
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In our supplemental material in our exercises,
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we have a bunch of string slices for you to do so
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that you can get as familiar as possible with
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it and really just dig down into it.
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That's going to be all for this video.
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I hope you enjoyed it and I hope
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you found it informative.
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I, as always,
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I'm your instructor, Joe Perry,
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and thank you for watching this here on Cybrary OnDemand.
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Come back for our next video
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in which we are going to learn
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more about input and output.
Up Next
2.7 Strings (Deep-Dive) Part 2 - IP
2.8 Numbers (Deep-Dive) - IP
2.9 Lists (Deep-Dive) - IP
2.10 Dictionaries (Deep-Dive) - IP
2.11 Summary and Review - IP
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