Working With Strings

A string is just text. You've used them since lesson one. Now let's do more with them.

Joining strings

You can stick strings together with +. But be careful — there's no automatic space, so you add your own:

first = "Ada"
last = "Lovelace"
print(first + " " + last)

The " " in the middle is a string containing a single space. Without it you'd get AdaLovelace squashed together.

The easy way: f-strings

Joining with + gets fiddly fast. Python has a lovely shortcut called an f-string. You put the letter f right before the opening quote, then drop variables straight into the text inside curly braces { }:

name = "Ada"
age = 36
print(f"{name} is {age} years old.")

That shows: Ada is 36 years old. Python swaps each {...} for the value inside it. F-strings are the friendly, modern way to build messages, and you'll use them constantly.

A couple of useful tricks

Strings can do things to themselves. We ask using a dot:

shout = "hello"
print(shout.upper())     # HELLO
print(len("hello"))      # 5  (how many characters)

.upper() makes a SHOUTING copy. len(...) counts the characters.

Your turn

Change the name and age in the f-string and run it.