Strings

Strings are immutable Unicode text sequences.

Compare three words by code-point count and UTF-8 byte count. ASCII characters take one byte each (hello 5 bytes); the in caf is one code point but two UTF-8 bytes; each Thai character takes three. The str type abstracts over all three.

Source

english = "hello"
french = "caf"
thai = ""

for label, word in [("English", english), ("French", french), ("Thai", thai)]:
    print(label, word, len(word), len(word.encode("utf-8")))

Output

English hello 5 5
French caf 4 5
Thai  6 18

CODEPOINTScafUTF-8 BYTES636166c3a9Strings are sequences of Unicode codepoints. UTF-8 encoding turns them into bytes; takes two bytes, c takes one.

Indexing and iteration work with Unicode code points, not encoded bytes. ord() returns the integer code point, which is often displayed in hexadecimal when teaching text encoding.

Source

print(thai[0])
print([hex(ord(char)) for char in thai[:2]])

Output


['0xe2a', '0xe27']

String methods return new strings because strings are immutable. Encoding turns text into bytes when another system needs a byte representation.

Source

text = "  caf  "
clean = text.strip()
print(clean)
print(clean.upper())
print(clean.encode("utf-8"))

Output

caf
CAF
b'caf\xc3\xa9'

Notes

Use str for text and bytes for binary data.
len(text) counts Unicode code points; len(text.encode("utf-8")) counts encoded bytes.
ASCII text is a useful baseline because each ASCII code point is one UTF-8 byte.
String methods return new strings because strings are immutable.
User-visible characters can be more subtle than code points; combining marks and emoji sequences may need specialized text handling.

Run the complete example

Expected output

English hello 5 5
French caf 4 5
Thai  6 18

['0xe2a', '0xe27']
caf
CAF
b'caf\xc3\xa9'

Execution time appears here after you run the example.

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Strings

See also

Run the complete example

Expected output