How To Get First And Last N Characters From A String In Python

It can be quite easy to get the first character in a string, but how can you get the first n characters from a string? Or what about the last n characters? To get more than one character from a string you can use the slice operator which has the syntax [start:stop:step]. For example, to get the first 5 characters from a string variable my_string use the slice operator as follows my_string[:5] or to get the last 5 characters from a string use my_string[-5:]. ...

February 26, 2022 · 5 min · 1019 words · Ryan Sheehy

Convert Percentage String To Decimal Like 30% To 0.3 In Python

How do you convert a string representing a percentage number into an actual number that can be used to perform calculations? To convert a string represented as a percentage number into an actual decimal number in Python use the built-in float() function after removing the percent symbol from the string and any other characters that prevent numeric conversion. Without purging from the original string the percent symbol you will get a ValueError as demonstrated below in the Python REPL: ...

February 10, 2022 · 4 min · 658 words · Ryan Sheehy

3 Ways To Check If String Can Convert To Integer In Python

How do you know if a string will convert to an integer in Python? There are 3 ways to check if a string will convert to an integer in Python and these methods are: use a try-catch on the int(string) operation or perform an operation on the string to remove all integers and see if anything is left – use either the regex library or the string.replace() method. Let’s look at each approach in a little more detail and use an example or two. ...

February 7, 2022 · 4 min · 829 words · Ryan Sheehy

Python Lower: Examples

How do you get a string to be all lowercase in Python? Thankfully there’s a built-in method that doesn’t require importing any external libraries to get a string to lower case, here’s how you do it. To get a string to all lowercase, use the built-in string method .lower(), which turns all characters in the string variable to lower case. Here is an example demonstrating the transformation of a string containing upper cases and converting them all to lower cases: ...

December 3, 2021 · 3 min · 551 words · Ryan Sheehy

How To Get First Character From String (Shortest Code And Examples)

Is there a quick and easy way to get the first character from a string in Python? Yes, there is using the slice operator. To get the first character in a string simply use the code my_string[0] where my_string is a variable containing the string and the slice operator [0] captures the first index of that string, being the first character. ...

December 1, 2021 · 4 min · 707 words · Ryan Sheehy

How To Get Last Character From A String (Shortest Code Examples)

How do you get the last character from a string using Python? Thankfully Python has an easy way to fetch the last character from a string using the slice operator. To get the last character of the string in Python use the syntax my_string[-1]. The square brackets are used to indicate a specific character by index number, and as string data types can be iterated, you can use the slice operator [:], specifically -1 inside to capture the last character. ...

December 1, 2021 · 6 min · 1167 words · Ryan Sheehy

How To Remove First & Last Characters From String In Python (Code Examples)

How can you remove the first and last characters from a string easily in Python? Can it be done using just one line of code? To remove the first and last characters from a string in Python use the slice operator on the string to return the needed characters, for example, my_string[1:-1]. Here is an example demonstrating the technique: 1 2 3 >>> my_string = "<html>" >>> my_string[1:-1] 'html' Slice Notation: How Does It Work? The powerful slice operator in Python allows you to capture a range according to the following pattern: ...

December 1, 2021 · 7 min · 1331 words · Ryan Sheehy

Check Empty String Python - 3 Unique Approaches

How can you check if a string is empty in Python? To determine if a string is empty in Python use of the following three means available: see if the string has any length by using the built-in len() function, do a direct comparison using the expression == "" or convert the string to a boolean data type and if the result is false it is an empty string. Let’s look at each approach and see how they perform. ...

November 25, 2021 · 5 min · 1022 words · Ryan Sheehy

Check For Word In String: Python 1 Liner

How can you check if a word is found in a string using Python? Recently, I had an issue where I wanted to exclude strings from a list if they contained a certain word. I thought I could use the following common code familiar to most using Python: i f # ' w d o o r d s ' o m i e n t h ' i h n o g w t o f i n d w o r d i n s t r i n g ' : But the problem ended up being a little more difficult than that. For example, what if you want to exclude the term word but not if that word is found inside other words, like sword? ...

July 14, 2021 · 6 min · 1217 words · Ryan Sheehy