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Strings & Characters Primer

Curriculum

  • 1 Section
  • 26 Lessons
  • Lifetime
Expand all sectionsCollapse all sections
  • Strings & Characters Primer
    26
    • 1.1
      About Strings and Characters
    • 1.2
      Strings for Exchanging Data
    • 1.3
      String Features: Indexing, Functions, Methods
    • 1.4
      First String
    • 1.5
      Try This: Display with Variable Labels
    • 1.6
      Characters Inside Strings
    • 1.7
      Try This: Print Alphabets
    • 1.8
      Your Turn: Print ASCII Chart
    • 1.9
      Access Characters
    • 1.10
      Try This: Check String Length
    • 1.11
      Your Turn: Check Every Character
    • 1.12
      String Surgery
    • 1.13
      Try This: Access Substrings
    • 1.14
      Your Turn: Create a Modified String
    • 1.15
      Compare, Find, Check
    • 1.16
      Try This: Find the Substring
    • 1.17
      Your Turn: Exact Match vs Found in String
    • 1.18
      Other Useful Methods
    • 1.19
      Try This: Accept in Any Case
    • 1.20
      Your Turn: Careful with string.replace
    • 1.21
      Convert Between Other Data Types
    • 1.22
      Try This: Check Variable Type
    • 1.23
      Your Turn: String to Int, Math and Back
    • 1.24
      Embed Code in Strings
    • 1.25
      Try This: Execute Statements from a String
    • 1.26
      Your Turn: A Script that Runs Scripts You Enter

Try This: Check String Length

If your script uses an index that’s larger than the string, it’ll cause an exception.  To find out how many characters are in a string, Python has that built-in function called len() that returns the number of characters in a string.  Your script can check a string’s length, then can then use that result in indexing when accessing characters in that string, so that it never tries to access an out of bounds character.  This is especially important when each character is indexed in a loop.

Before indexing all the characters in a string, let’s use len() to verify that there are 12 characters in the string.

Example script: char_access_try_this

  • Enter, name, and save char_access_try_this.  
  • Click the Send to micro:bit button.
# char_access_try_this

from microbit import *

sleep(1000)

s = "ABCDEF 12345"
 
print("Characters in s:")

length = len(s)

print("length =", length)

print()
  • Check the results in the serial monitor.
  • Verify that it displays length = 12.

 


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Access Characters
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Your Turn: Check Every Character
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