Textual data in Python in represented by string objects. Strings are immutable sequences of unicode code points. Strings in Python can be written in three ways:

1. Single quotes

• Single quoted strings allows embedded double quotes.
• Single quoted strings do not span multiple lines.

txt = 'hello world from Python language'
txt = 'hello world from "Python" language'

2. Double quotes

• Double quoted strings allow embedded single quotes.
• Double quoted strings do not span multiple lines.

txt = "hello world from Python language"
txt = "hello world from 'Python' language"

3. Triple quotes

• Triple quoted strings allow embedded single and double quotes.
• Triple quoted strings may span multiple lines and all whitespace between the triple quotes will be included in the string literal.
• Triple quotes strings are used to write doc strings.

txt=''' hello
	world 
	from 
	Python'''
	
txt=""" hello
	world
	from 
	Python"""

x = 'hello world'
print(type(x))

y = "hello world" 
print(type(y))

z = '''hello
        world
        from 
        Python'''
print(type(z))

Output

<class 'str'>
<class 'str'>
<class 'str'>

Note

• Character data type like the language Java is not there in Python. So if you write 'C', then it is still a string of length 1.
• String type is immutable. All string methods returns new values. They do not change the original string.

Accessing characters in a string

As we know that string is a sequence of characters, we can access characters of the string using indexing. Index starts from 0. Trying to access a character out of index range will raise an IndexError. The index must be an integer. We can’t use floats or other types, this will result into TypeError.

x = 'hello'
print(x[0])
print(x[1])
print(x[2])
print(x[3])
print(x[4])

Output

h
e
l
l
o

Negative Indexing

Python support negative indexing. Index of -1 represents last character, -2 represents second last character and so on.

x = 'hello'
print(x[-1])
print(x[-2])
print(x[-3])
print(x[-4])
print(x[-5])

Output

o
l
l
e
h

Escape Character

There is a certain format to write a string. You can not use certain characters within quotes while writing a string. For example, you can not use a double quote in a double quoted string. For example:

#Double quotes inside double quoted string is not allowed
txt = "This is a "hello world" greeting message from Learnitweb"

To fix this problem we can escape double quotes. An escape character is a backslash \ followed by the character you want to insert.

The above string can be written as:

txt = "This is a \"hello world\" greeting message from Learnitweb"

Other recognized escape sequences in Python are:

Escape Sequence	Meaning
\newline	Backslash and newline ignored
\\	Backslash ()
\’	Single quote (‘)
\”	Double quote (“)
\a	ASCII Bell (BEL)
\b	ASCII Backspace (BS)
\f	ASCII Formfeed (FF)
\n	ASCII Linefeed (LF)
\r	ASCII Carriage Return (CR)
\t	ASCII Horizontal Tab (TAB)
\v	ASCII Vertical Tab (VT)
\ooo	Character with octal value ooo
\xhh	Character with hex value hh