String Methods
Syntax#
- str.capitalize() -> str
- str.casefold() -> str [only for Python > 3.3]
- str.center(width[, fillchar]) -> str
- str.count(sub[, start[, end]]) -> int
- str.decode(encoding=“utf-8”[, errors]) -> unicode [only in Python 2.x]
- str.encode(encoding=“utf-8”, errors=“strict”) -> bytes
- str.endswith(suffix[, start[, end]]) -> bool
- str.expandtabs(tabsize=8) -> str
- str.find(sub[, start[, end]]) -> int
- str.format(*args, **kwargs) -> str
- str.format_map(mapping) -> str
- str.index(sub[, start[, end]]) -> int
- str.isalnum() -> bool
- str.isalpha() -> bool
- str.isdecimal() -> bool
- str.isdigit() -> bool
- str.isidentifier() -> bool
- str.islower() -> bool
- str.isnumeric() -> bool
- str.isprintable() -> bool
- str.isspace() -> bool
- str.istitle() -> bool
- str.isupper() -> bool
- str.join(iterable) -> str
- str.ljust(width[, fillchar]) -> str
- str.lower() -> str
- str.lstrip([chars]) -> str
- static str.maketrans(x[, y[, z]])
- str.partition(sep) -> (head, sep, tail)
- str.replace(old, new[, count]) -> str
- str.rfind(sub[, start[, end]]) -> int
- str.rindex(sub[, start[, end]]) -> int
- str.rjust(width[, fillchar]) -> str
- str.rpartition(sep) -> (head, sep, tail)
- str.rsplit(sep=None, maxsplit=-1) -> list of strings
- str.rstrip([chars]) -> str
- str.split(sep=None, maxsplit=-1) -> list of strings
- str.splitlines([keepends]) -> list of strings
- str.startswith(prefix[, start[, end]]) -> book
- str.strip([chars]) -> str
- str.swapcase() -> str
- str.title() -> str
- str.translate(table) -> str
- str.upper() -> str
- str.zfill(width) -> str
Remarks#
String objects are immutable, meaning that they can’t be modified in place the way a list can. Because of this, methods on the built-in type str
always return a new str
object, which contains the result of the method call.
Changing the capitalization of a string
Python’s string type provides many functions that act on the capitalization of a string. These include :
str.casefold
str.upper
str.lower
str.capitalize
str.title
str.swapcase
With unicode strings (the default in Python 3), these operations are not 1:1 mappings or reversible. Most of these operations are intended for display purposes, rather than normalization.
str.casefold()
str.casefold
creates a lowercase string that is suitable for case insensitive comparisons. This is more aggressive than str.lower
and may modify strings that are already in lowercase or cause strings to grow in length, and is not intended for display purposes.
"XßΣ".casefold()
# 'xssσ'
"XßΣ".lower()
# 'xßς'
The transformations that take place under casefolding are defined by the Unicode Consortium in the CaseFolding.txt file on their website.
str.upper()
str.upper
takes every character in a string and converts it to its uppercase equivalent, for example:
"This is a 'string'.".upper()
# "THIS IS A 'STRING'."
str.lower()
str.lower
does the opposite; it takes every character in a string and converts it to its lowercase equivalent:
"This IS a 'string'.".lower()
# "this is a 'string'."
str.capitalize()
str.capitalize
returns a capitalized version of the string, that is, it makes the first character have upper case and the rest lower:
"this Is A 'String'.".capitalize() # Capitalizes the first character and lowercases all others
# "This is a 'string'."
str.title()
str.title
returns the title cased version of the string, that is, every letter in the beginning of a word is made upper case and all others are made lower case:
"this Is a 'String'".title()
# "This Is A 'String'"
str.swapcase()
str.swapcase
returns a new string object in which all lower case characters are swapped to upper case and all upper case characters to lower:
"this iS A STRiNG".swapcase() #Swaps case of each character
# "THIS Is a strIng"
Usage as str
class methods
It is worth noting that these methods may be called either on string objects (as shown above) or as a class method of the str
class (with an explicit call to str.upper
, etc.)
str.upper("This is a 'string'")
# "THIS IS A 'STRING'"
This is most useful when applying one of these methods to many strings at once in say, a map
function.
map(str.upper,["These","are","some","'strings'"])
# ['THESE', 'ARE', 'SOME', "'STRINGS'"]
Split a string based on a delimiter into a list of strings
str.split(sep=None, maxsplit=-1)
str.split
takes a string and returns a list of substrings of the original string. The behavior differs depending on whether the sep
argument is provided or omitted.
If sep
isn’t provided, or is None
, then the splitting takes place wherever there is whitespace. However, leading and trailing whitespace is ignored, and multiple consecutive whitespace characters are treated the same as a single whitespace character:
>>> "This is a sentence.".split()
['This', 'is', 'a', 'sentence.']
>>> " This is a sentence. ".split()
['This', 'is', 'a', 'sentence.']
>>> " ".split()
[]
The sep
parameter can be used to define a delimiter string. The original string is split where the delimiter string occurs, and the delimiter itself is discarded. Multiple consecutive delimiters are not treated the same as a single occurrence, but rather cause empty strings to be created.
>>> "This is a sentence.".split(' ')
['This', 'is', 'a', 'sentence.']
>>> "Earth,Stars,Sun,Moon".split(',')
['Earth', 'Stars', 'Sun', 'Moon']
>>> " This is a sentence. ".split(' ')
['', 'This', 'is', '', '', '', 'a', 'sentence.', '', '']
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('e')
['This is a s', 'nt', 'nc', '.']
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('en')
['This is a s', 't', 'ce.']
The default is to split on every occurrence of the delimiter, however the maxsplit
parameter limits the number of splittings that occur. The default value of -1
means no limit:
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('e', maxsplit=0)
['This is a sentence.']
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('e', maxsplit=1)
['This is a s', 'ntence.']
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('e', maxsplit=2)
['This is a s', 'nt', 'nce.']
>>> "This is a sentence.".split('e', maxsplit=-1)
['This is a s', 'nt', 'nc', '.']
str.rsplit(sep=None, maxsplit=-1)
str.rsplit
(“right split”) differs from str.split
(“left split”) when maxsplit
is specified. The splitting starts at the end of the string rather than at the beginning:
>>> "This is a sentence.".rsplit('e', maxsplit=1)
['This is a sentenc', '.']
>>> "This is a sentence.".rsplit('e', maxsplit=2)
['This is a sent', 'nc', '.']
Note: Python specifies the maximum number of splits performed, while most other programming languages specify the maximum number of substrings created. This may create confusion when porting or comparing code.
Replace all occurrences of one substring with another substring
Python’s str
type also has a method for replacing occurences of one sub-string with another sub-string in a given string. For more demanding cases, one can use re.sub
.
str.replace(old, new[, count])
:
str.replace
takes two arguments old
and new
containing the old
sub-string which is to be replaced by the new
sub-string. The optional argument count
specifies the number of replacements to be made:
For example, in order to replace 'foo'
with 'spam'
in the following string, we can call str.replace
with old = 'foo'
and new = 'spam'
:
>>> "Make sure to foo your sentence.".replace('foo', 'spam')
"Make sure to spam your sentence."
If the given string contains multiple examples that match the old
argument, all occurrences are replaced with the value supplied in new
:
>>> "It can foo multiple examples of foo if you want.".replace('foo', 'spam')
"It can spam multiple examples of spam if you want."
unless, of course, we supply a value for count
. In this case count
occurrences are going to get replaced:
>>> """It can foo multiple examples of foo if you want, \
... or you can limit the foo with the third argument.""".replace('foo', 'spam', 1)
'It can spam multiple examples of foo if you want, or you can limit the foo with the third argument.'
str.format and f-strings: Format values into a string
Python provides string interpolation and formatting functionality through the str.format
function, introduced in version 2.6 and f-strings introduced in version 3.6.
Given the following variables:
i = 10
f = 1.5
s = "foo"
l = ['a', 1, 2]
d = {'a': 1, 2: 'foo'}
The following statements are all equivalent
"10 1.5 foo ['a', 1, 2] {'a': 1, 2: 'foo'}"
>>> "{} {} {} {} {}".format(i, f, s, l, d)
>>> str.format("{} {} {} {} {}", i, f, s, l, d)
>>> "{0} {1} {2} {3} {4}".format(i, f, s, l, d)
>>> "{0:d} {1:0.1f} {2} {3!r} {4!r}".format(i, f, s, l, d)
>>> "{i:d} {f:0.1f} {s} {l!r} {d!r}".format(i=i, f=f, s=s, l=l, d=d)
>>> f"{i} {f} {s} {l} {d}"
>>> f"{i:d} {f:0.1f} {s} {l!r} {d!r}"
For reference, Python also supports C-style qualifiers for string formatting. The examples below are equivalent to those above, but the str.format
versions are preferred due to benefits in flexibility, consistency of notation, and extensibility:
"%d %0.1f %s %r %r" % (i, f, s, l, d)
"%(i)d %(f)0.1f %(s)s %(l)r %(d)r" % dict(i=i, f=f, s=s, l=l, d=d)
The braces uses for interpolation in str.format
can also be numbered to reduce duplication when formatting strings. For example, the following are equivalent:
"I am from Australia. I love cupcakes from Australia!"
>>> "I am from {}. I love cupcakes from {}!".format("Australia", "Australia")
>>> "I am from {0}. I love cupcakes from {0}!".format("Australia")
While the official python documentation is, as usual, thorough enough, pyformat.info has a great set of examples with detailed explanations.
Additionally, the {
and }
characters can be escaped by using double brackets:
"{'a': 5, 'b': 6}"
>>> "{{'{}': {}, '{}': {}}}".format("a", 5, "b", 6)
>>> f"{{'{'a'}': {5}, '{'b'}': {6}}"
See String Formatting for additional information. str.format()
was proposed in PEP 3101 and f-strings in PEP 498.
Counting number of times a substring appears in a string
One method is available for counting the number of occurrences of a sub-string in another string, str.count
.
str.count(sub[, start[, end]])
str.count
returns an int
indicating the number of non-overlapping occurrences of the sub-string sub
in another string. The optional arguments start
and end
indicate the beginning and the end in which the search will take place. By default start = 0
and end = len(str)
meaning the whole string will be searched:
>>> s = "She sells seashells by the seashore."
>>> s.count("sh")
2
>>> s.count("se")
3
>>> s.count("sea")
2
>>> s.count("seashells")
1
By specifying a different value for start
, end
we can get a more localized search and count, for example, if start
is equal to 13
the call to:
>>> s.count("sea", start)
1
is equivalent to:
>>> t = s[start:]
>>> t.count("sea")
1
Test the starting and ending characters of a string
In order to test the beginning and ending of a given string in Python, one can use the methods str.startswith()
and str.endswith()
.
str.startswith(prefix[, start[, end]])
As it’s name implies, str.startswith
is used to test whether a given string starts with the given characters in prefix
.
>>> s = "This is a test string"
>>> s.startswith("T")
True
>>> s.startswith("Thi")
True
>>> s.startswith("thi")
False
The optional arguments start
and end
specify the start and end points from which the testing will start and finish. In the following example, by specifying a start value of 2
our string will be searched from position 2
and afterwards:
>>> s.startswith("is", 2)
True
This yields True
since s[2] == 'i'
and s[3] == 's'
.
You can also use a tuple
to check if it starts with any of a set of strings
>>> s.startswith(('This', 'That'))
True
>>> s.startswith(('ab', 'bc'))
False
str.endswith(prefix[, start[, end]])
str.endswith
is exactly similar to str.startswith
with the only difference being that it searches for ending characters and not starting characters. For example, to test if a string ends in a full stop, one could write:
>>> s = "this ends in a full stop."
>>> s.endswith('.')
True
>>> s.endswith('!')
False
as with startswith
more than one characters can used as the ending sequence:
>>> s.endswith('stop.')
True
>>> s.endswith('Stop.')
False
You can also use a tuple
to check if it ends with any of a set of strings
>>> s.endswith(('.', 'something'))
True
>>> s.endswith(('ab', 'bc'))
False
Testing what a string is composed of
Python’s str
type also features a number of methods that can be used to evaluate the contents of a string. These are str.isalpha
, str.isdigit
, str.isalnum
, str.isspace
. Capitalization can be tested with str.isupper
, str.islower
and str.istitle
.
str.isalpha
str.isalpha
takes no arguments and returns True
if the all characters in a given string are alphabetic, for example:
>>> "Hello World".isalpha() # contains a space
False
>>> "Hello2World".isalpha() # contains a number
False
>>> "HelloWorld!".isalpha() # contains punctuation
False
>>> "HelloWorld".isalpha()
True
As an edge case, the empty string evaluates to False
when used with "".isalpha()
.
str.isupper
, str.islower
, str.istitle
These methods test the capitalization in a given string.
str.isupper
is a method that returns True
if all characters in a given string are uppercase and False
otherwise.
>>> "HeLLO WORLD".isupper()
False
>>> "HELLO WORLD".isupper()
True
>>> "".isupper()
False
Conversely, str.islower
is a method that returns True
if all characters in a given string are lowercase and False
otherwise.
>>> "Hello world".islower()
False
>>> "hello world".islower()
True
>>> "".islower()
False
str.istitle
returns True
if the given string is title cased; that is, every word begins with an uppercase character followed by lowercase characters.
>>> "hello world".istitle()
False
>>> "Hello world".istitle()
False
>>> "Hello World".istitle()
True
>>> "".istitle()
False
str.isdecimal
, str.isdigit
, str.isnumeric
str.isdecimal
returns whether the string is a sequence of decimal digits, suitable for representing a decimal number.
str.isdigit
includes digits not in a form suitable for representing a decimal
number, such as superscript digits.
str.isnumeric
includes any number values, even if not digits, such as values outside the range 0-9.
isdecimal isdigit isnumeric
12345 True True True
១2߃໔5 True True True
①²³🄅₅ False True True
⑩⒓ False False True
Five False False False
Bytestrings (bytes
in Python 3, str
in Python 2), only support isdigit
, which only checks for basic ASCII digits.
As with str.isalpha
, the empty string evaluates to False
.
str.isalnum
This is a combination of str.isalpha
and str.isnumeric
, specifically it evaluates to True
if all characters in the given string are alphanumeric, that is, they consist of alphabetic or numeric characters:
>>> "Hello2World".isalnum()
True
>>> "HelloWorld".isalnum()
True
>>> "2016".isalnum()
True
>>> "Hello World".isalnum() # contains whitespace
False
str.isspace
Evaluates to True
if the string contains only whitespace characters.
>>> "\t\r\n".isspace()
True
>>> " ".isspace()
True
Sometimes a string looks “empty” but we don’t know whether it’s because it contains just whitespace or no character at all
>>> "".isspace()
False
To cover this case we need an additional test
>>> my_str = ''
>>> my_str.isspace()
False
>>> my_str.isspace() or not my_str
True
But the shortest way to test if a string is empty or just contains whitespace characters is to use strip
(with no arguments it removes all leading and trailing whitespace characters)
>>> not my_str.strip()
True
str.translate: Translating characters in a string
Python supports a translate
method on the str
type which allows you to specify the translation table (used for replacements) as well as any characters which should be deleted in the process.
str.translate(table[, deletechars])
Parameter | Description |
---|---|
table |
It is a lookup table that defines the mapping from one character to another. |
deletechars |
A list of characters which are to be removed from the string. |
The maketrans
method (str.maketrans
in Python 3 and string.maketrans
in Python 2) allows you to generate a translation table.
>>> translation_table = str.maketrans("aeiou", "12345")
>>> my_string = "This is a string!"
>>> translated = my_string.translate(translation_table)
'Th3s 3s 1 str3ng!'
The translate
method returns a string which is a translated copy of the original string.
You can set the table
argument to None
if you only need to delete characters.
>>> 'this syntax is very useful'.translate(None, 'aeiou')
'ths syntx s vry sfl'
Stripping unwanted leading/trailing characters from a string
Three methods are provided that offer the ability to strip leading and trailing characters from a string: str.strip
, str.rstrip
and str.lstrip
. All three methods have the same signature and all three return a new string object with unwanted characters removed.
str.strip([chars])
str.strip
acts on a given string and removes (strips) any leading or trailing characters contained in the argument chars
; if chars
is not supplied or is None
, all white space characters are removed by default. For example:
>>> " a line with leading and trailing space ".strip()
'a line with leading and trailing space'
If chars
is supplied, all characters contained in it are removed from the string, which is returned. For example:
>>> ">>> a Python prompt".strip('> ') # strips '>' character and space character
'a Python prompt'
str.rstrip([chars])
and str.lstrip([chars])
These methods have similar semantics and arguments with str.strip()
, their difference lies in the direction from which they start. str.rstrip()
starts from the end of the string while str.lstrip()
splits from the start of the string.
For example, using str.rstrip
:
>>> " spacious string ".rstrip()
' spacious string'
While, using str.lstrip
:
>>> " spacious string ".rstrip()
'spacious string '
Case insensitive string comparisons
Comparing string in a case insensitive way seems like something that’s trivial, but it’s not. This section only considers unicode strings (the default in Python 3). Note that Python 2 may have subtle weaknesses relative to Python 3 - the later’s unicode handling is much more complete.
The first thing to note it that case-removing conversions in unicode aren’t trivial. There is text for which text.lower() != text.upper().lower()
, such as "ß"
:
>>> "ß".lower()
'ß'
>>> "ß".upper().lower()
'ss'
But let’s say you wanted to caselessly compare "BUSSE"
and "Buße"
. Heck, you probably also want to compare "BUSSE"
and "BUẞE"
equal - that’s the newer capital form. The recommended way is to use casefold
:
>>> help(str.casefold)
"""
Help on method_descriptor:
casefold(...)
S.casefold() -> str
Return a version of S suitable for caseless comparisons.
"""
Do not just use lower
. If casefold
is not available, doing .upper().lower()
helps (but only somewhat).
Then you should consider accents. If your font renderer is good, you probably think "ê" == "ê"
- but it doesn’t:
>>> "ê" == "ê"
False
This is because they are actually
>>> import unicodedata
>>> [unicodedata.name(char) for char in "ê"]
['LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX']
>>> [unicodedata.name(char) for char in "ê"]
['LATIN SMALL LETTER E', 'COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT']
The simplest way to deal with this is unicodedata.normalize
. You probably want to use NFKD normalization, but feel free to check the documentation. Then one does
>>> unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", "ê") == unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", "ê")
True
To finish up, here this is expressed in functions:
import unicodedata
def normalize_caseless(text):
return unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", text.casefold())
def caseless_equal(left, right):
return normalize_caseless(left) == normalize_caseless(right)
Join a list of strings into one string
A string can be used as a separator to join a list of strings together into a
single string using the join()
method. For example you can create a string
where each element in a list is separated by a space.
>>> " ".join(["once","upon","a","time"])
"once upon a time"
The following example separates the string elements with three hyphens.
>>> "---".join(["once", "upon", "a", "time"])
"once---upon---a---time"
String module’s useful constants
Python’s string
module provides constants for string related operations. To use them, import the string
module:
>>> import string
string.ascii_letters
:
Concatenation of ascii_lowercase
and ascii_uppercase
:
>>> string.ascii_letters
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
string.ascii_lowercase
:
Contains all lower case ASCII characters:
>>> string.ascii_lowercase
'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
string.ascii_uppercase
:
Contains all upper case ASCII characters:
>>> string.ascii_uppercase
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
string.digits
:
Contains all decimal digit characters:
>>> string.digits
'0123456789'
string.hexdigits
:
Contains all hex digit characters:
>>> string.hexdigits
'0123456789abcdefABCDEF'
string.octaldigits
:
Contains all octal digit characters:
>>> string.octaldigits
'01234567'
string.punctuation
:
Contains all characters which are considered punctuation in the C
locale:
>>> string.punctuation
'!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~'
string.whitespace
:
Contains all ASCII characters considered whitespace:
>>> string.whitespace
' \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'
In script mode, print(string.whitespace)
will print the actual characters, use str
to get the string returned above.
string.printable
:
Contains all characters which are considered printable; a combination of string.digits
, string.ascii_letters
, string.punctuation
, and string.whitespace
.
>>> string.printable
'0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!"#$%&\'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\\]^_`{|}~ \t\n\r\x0b\x0c'
Reversing a string
A string can reversed using the built-in reversed()
function, which takes a string and returns an iterator in reverse order.
>>> reversed('hello')
<reversed object at 0x0000000000000000>
>>> [char for char in reversed('hello')]
['o', 'l', 'l', 'e', 'h']
reversed()
can be wrapped in a call to ''.join()
to make a string from the iterator.
>>> ''.join(reversed('hello'))
'olleh'
While using reversed()
might be more readable to uninitiated Python users, using extended slicing with a step of -1
is faster and more concise. Here , try to implement it as function:
>>> def reversed_string(main_string):
... return main_string[::-1]
...
>>> reversed_string('hello')
'olleh'
Justify strings
Python provides functions for justifying strings, enabling text padding to make aligning various strings much easier.
Below is an example of str.ljust
and str.rjust
:
interstates_lengths = {
5: (1381, 2222),
19: (63, 102),
40: (2555, 4112),
93: (189,305),
}
for road, length in interstates_lengths.items():
miles,kms = length
print('{} -> {} mi. ({} km.)'.format(str(road).rjust(4), str(miles).ljust(4), str(kms).ljust(4)))
40 -> 2555 mi. (4112 km.)
19 -> 63 mi. (102 km.)
5 -> 1381 mi. (2222 km.)
93 -> 189 mi. (305 km.)
ljust
and rjust
are very similar. Both have a width
parameter and an optional fillchar
parameter. Any string created by these functions is at least as long as the width
parameter that was passed into the function. If the string is longer than width
alread, it is not truncated. The fillchar
argument, which defaults to the space character ' '
must be a single character, not a multicharacter string.
The ljust
function pads the end of the string it is called on with the fillchar
until it is width
characters long. The rjust
function pads the beginning of the string in a similar fashion. Therefore, the l
and r
in the names of these functions refer to the side that the original string, not the fillchar
, is positioned in the output string.
Conversion between str or bytes data and unicode characters
The contents of files and network messages may represent encoded characters. They often need to be converted to unicode for proper display.
In Python 2, you may need to convert str data to Unicode characters. The default (''
, ""
, etc.) is an ASCII string, with any values outside of ASCII range displayed as escaped values. Unicode strings are u''
(or u""
, etc.).
# You get "© abc" encoded in UTF-8 from a file, network, or other data source
s = '\xc2\xa9 abc' # s is a byte array, not a string of characters
# Doesn't know the original was UTF-8
# Default form of string literals in Python 2
s[0] # '\xc2' - meaningless byte (without context such as an encoding)
type(s) # str - even though it's not a useful one w/o having a known encoding
u = s.decode('utf-8') # u'\xa9 abc'
# Now we have a Unicode string, which can be read as UTF-8 and printed properly
# In Python 2, Unicode string literals need a leading u
# str.decode converts a string which may contain escaped bytes to a Unicode string
u[0] # u'\xa9' - Unicode Character 'COPYRIGHT SIGN' (U+00A9) '©'
type(u) # unicode
u.encode('utf-8') # '\xc2\xa9 abc'
# unicode.encode produces a string with escaped bytes for non-ASCII characters
In Python 3 you may need to convert arrays of bytes (referred to as a ‘byte literal’) to strings of Unicode characters. The default is now a Unicode string, and bytestring literals must now be entered as b''
, b""
, etc. A byte literal will return True
to isinstance(some_val, byte)
, assuming some_val
to be a string that might be encoded as bytes.
# You get from file or network "© abc" encoded in UTF-8
s = b'\xc2\xa9 abc' # s is a byte array, not characters
# In Python 3, the default string literal is Unicode; byte array literals need a leading b
s[0] # b'\xc2' - meaningless byte (without context such as an encoding)
type(s) # bytes - now that byte arrays are explicit, Python can show that.
u = s.decode('utf-8') # '© abc' on a Unicode terminal
# bytes.decode converts a byte array to a string (which will, in Python 3, be Unicode)
u[0] # '\u00a9' - Unicode Character 'COPYRIGHT SIGN' (U+00A9) '©'
type(u) # str
# The default string literal in Python 3 is UTF-8 Unicode
u.encode('utf-8') # b'\xc2\xa9 abc'
# str.encode produces a byte array, showing ASCII-range bytes as unescaped characters.
String Contains
Python makes it extremely intuitive to check if a string contains a given substring. Just use the in
operator:
>>> "foo" in "foo.baz.bar"
True
Note: testing an empty string will always result in True
:
>>> "" in "test"
True