Built-In String Methods: Overview

Strings and Character Data in Python Christopher Bailey 02:06

Methods are similar to functions. A method is a specialized type of callable procedure that is tightly associated with an object. Like a function, a method is called to perform a distinct task. But it is invoked on a specific object and has knowledge of its target object during execution.

In this section, you’ll explore several categories of string object methods:

Case conversion
Find and seek
Character classification
String formatting
Converting between strings and lists

00:00 Welcome to Section 2. This video is going to cover the string methods overview.

00:06 To understand methods, you need to know that they’re very similar to functions.

00:12 A method is a specialized type of callable procedure. It’s tightly associated with an object. When creating objects in object-oriented programming, you can define methods that can later be called upon those objects.

00:25 I will include links below this video to additional articles and courses here on Real Python where you can learn more. Like a function, a method is called to perform a distinct task, but they’re invoked on a specific object. And because of that, it will have knowledge of its target object during its execution.

00:45 The syntax that’s used starts with the name of the object—in this case, obj, a dot (.), and then the name of the method. Inside the parentheses, like you would in a function, you can pass arguments. The variety of the string methods you’re going to learn, in some cases, take no arguments, and some may take one or have additional optional arguments.

01:09 I’ll describe that in much more detail as you continue on. What kind of methods are you going to cover? There’s several categories.

01:16 You’ll start off talking about case, meaning upper and lower or title—different types of case formats and how they can be applied to your strings. Then, as you’ve done a little bit with indexing, it might be handy to find strings inside of other strings, creating substrings and so forth. So, a little bit of find and seek methods.

01:36 Then, what type of characters are we dealing with? We’ve already talked about ord() (ordinal) and its conversion to characters individually, but there’s also a need to find what kind of characters are inside of a string.

01:47 Next, a whole set of string formatting methods. Then, how to convert between strings and lists. Lists are a data type that are a whole other subject to themselves, so I will show you the basics and then discuss how to convert between the two.

02:02 So, I think you’re ready to start—with case conversion methods.

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