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| Is There a Way to Substring a String in Python |
Is There a Way to Substring a String in Python
Python offers many ways to substring a string. It is often called 'slicing'.
It follows this template:
string[start: end: step]
Where,
start: The starting index of the substring. The character at this index is included in the substring. If start is not included, it is assumed to equal to 0.
end: The terminating index of the substring. The character at this index is NOT included in the substring. If end is not included, or if the specified value exceeds the string length, it is assumed to be equal to the length of the string by default.
step: Every 'step' character after the current character to be included. The default value is 1. If the step value is omitted, it is assumed to equal to 1.
Template
string[start:end]: Get all characters from index start to end-1
string[:end]: Get all characters from the beginning of the string to end-1
string[start:]: Get all characters from index start to the end of the string
string[start:end:step]: Get all characters from start to end-1 discounting every step character
Examples
- Get the first 5 characters of a string
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[0:5])
Output:
> freeC
Note: print(string[:5]) returns the same result as print(string[0:5])
- Get a substring of length 4 from the 3rd character of the string
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[2:6])
Output:
> eeCo
Please note that the start or end index may be a negative number. A negative index means that you start counting from the end of the string instead of the beginning (i.e from the right to left). Index -1 represents the last character of the string, -2 represents the second to last character and so on...
- Get the last character of the string
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[-1])
Output:
> p
- Get the last 5 characters of a string
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[-5:])
Output:
> eCamp
- Get a substring which contains all characters except the last 4 characters and the 1st character
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[1:-4])
Output:
> reeCode
More examples
str = “freeCodeCamp”
print str[-5:-2] # prints ‘eCa’
print str[-1:-2] # prints ‘’ (empty string)
- Get every other character from a string
string = "freeCodeCamp"
print(string[::2])
Output:
> feCdCm