Alright, so what is a string?
Well, a string is any text that you want to be treated as text within a program. So
again we need to talk about a few other things that we're going to be talking
about actually a few videos from now, but for right now just trying to follow
along. So, this is a string because it's wrapped in quotations, and if we hit
enter
Python is going to say hello string. Now, you can also use single quotations here
to do the same thing. So basically you have two options either using double
quotations or single quotations, and let's say you want to have a word in
your string that you well let's say you need to have a word in that string of
text which contains an apostrophe. So let's say we wrapped in single quotes and we
say 'don't do that' Python is going to freak out about that because what it thinks
is happening is that we're starting a string here, we're typing three letters,
and then we're ending the string, and then it doesn't know what to do about
all this.
It's saying well to do that I don't know what that means, it's no variable, and
there's no function that I can perform on this, so I'm just going to freak out
and give you a syntax error. So what you would need to do in order to print out
don't do that is you can just wrap it in double quotations and then just type
don't do that, and as you can see what I print it's going to keep that intact. Now
alternatively let's say you want to quote somebody. So, let's wrap in double
quotes and say, "she said "I want this" and then close it, close it. Again. it's gonna
freak out because what it thinks that we're trying to do is start a string, say
she said,
then end the string and then it's going to freak out over all this because it
doesn't realize that this is part of that string because we have explicitly
told it to end the string here.
So what you would do in this instance is just wrap the entire string in single
quotations. So, 'she said "I want this"' and as you can see it's going to print it
out correctly. Now alternatively what if she said something that had an
apostrophe in it. So, let's try and cope with that so 'she said "don't put that
there"' again it's going to freak out because we're starting the string
here, we're adding a single quotation which is not interpreting as the other
string, in fact right here where this apostrophe is it thinks that's the end of the string,
so it's treating this like a string and then this as constants, or variables, or
whatever and it doesn't know what to do with them because we're not telling it to
do anything and then these just random quotations here.
So what we need to do in this instance is we need to learn about escaping
certain characters. So, let's write it out first then i'll explain it.
So what we're going to do is wrap it in single quotes and we're going to say 'she
said "don/ 't do that"' and what's happening here, let's hit enter. That's not what...let me
that out. It's just returning what we wrote there.
There. So we print that out and what this does is the backslash here
tells the next character to be interpreted as text regardless of what it
would normally be interpreted as, so rather than this trying to end the
string Python knows at this point that we want this to be printed out with the
string and not end the string but just printed out as a single character, and so
that's what it's going to do. So there's times when you're going to need to do
each of these in your Python code and so that's how to handle strings and what
they are. Again, a string is just a series of characters which is interpreted as
text and you can print it, you can manipulate it,
we're actually going to get into string manipulation in the next video.