Working with text

Strings have methods

A string is a piece of text, and every string comes with methods. A method is a function that belongs to a value. You write the value, a dot, and the method name.

city = "lisbon"
print(city.upper())   # LISBON
print(city.title())   # Lisbon

A string method never changes the string. It gives you a new string. If you want to keep the new string, put it in a variable.

Methods you will use often

Code	Result
" hi ".strip()	"hi"
"Hello".lower()	"hello"
"hello".upper()	"HELLO"
"a quick fox".title()	"A Quick Fox"
"a-b-c".split("-")	["a", "b", "c"]
"red fox".replace("red", "grey")	"grey fox"
"hello".startswith("he")	True

split() with nothing in the parentheses splits at spaces, and it ignores extra spaces. It returns a list. You will learn about lists in lesson 6.

Length, positions, and slices

word = "python"
print(len(word))     # 6
print(word[0])       # p
print(word[-1])      # n  (the last character)
print(word[1:4])     # yth  (from position 1 up to, but not including, 4)

in checks whether a piece of text is inside another one:

print("th" in word)  # True

Your turn

The variable message is already in the editor. It has extra spaces at both ends. Write your code under it.