Python Morsels: String Concatenation and String Interpolation

Transcript

Let's talk about how to build-up bigger strings out of smaller strings in Python. The two methods for doing this are string concatenation and string interpolation.

String Concatenation

We've got a string that represents a name Trey, and we're going to make a new string "My name is Trey". We're doing this by using the + symbol between the string, My name is, and the string Trey:

>>> name = "Trey"
>>> message = "My name is " + name
>>> message
'My name is Trey'

This is called string concatenation. The word concatenation is basically just a fancy word for gluing things together. So when we're concatenating two strings, we're gluing them together by using the + sign.

Now, string concatenation is great, but it can get a little bit unwieldy at times.

Here's a much longer example of string concatenation:

>>> "My name is " + name + " which has " + len(name) + " characters."

It's easy to make typos, while you're using string concatenation because you've got quotes and pluses all interspersed between each other. We didn't end up making a typo above, but we do have a bug in our code.

>>> "My name is " + name + " which has " + len(name) + " characters."
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: can only concatenate str (not "int") to str

Calling len(name) returns an integer. While we can use + to add an integer to an integer and we can use + to concatenate a string with a string, we cannot use + between a string and an integer.

So, we need to convert len(name) to a string in order to concatenate all these strings together:

>>> "My name is " + name + " which has " + str(len(name)) + " characters."
'My name is Trey which has 4 characters.'

The code that we ended up with is pretty readable Python code, but it could be more readable.

String Interpolation

The other way to build up a bigger string out of smaller strings is string interpolation. In Python this is often called string formatting. To do string formatting, we can use an f-string.

An f-string isn't the only tool for this (the string format method is the other), but it's the most common one you'll see:

>>> f"My name is {name} which has {len(name)} characters."
'My name is Trey which has 4 characters.'

An f-string is a string with an "f" in front of it. Without that "f" in front of it, it's just a regular string:

>>> "My name is {name} which has {len(name)} characters."
'My name is {name} which has {len(name)} characters.'

Simply by putting an f just before the string, regardless of whether we're using double quotes " or single quotes ', Python will look for curly braces inside the string we've written and it will execute whatever is inside of those curly braces ({...}), taking whatever object comes back from that code execution, and then convert it to a string if needed (as with len(name)). Next, it will stick those little strings inside of our bigger string, essentially injecting them into our bigger string:

>>> f"My name is {name} which has {len(name)} characters."
'My name is Trey which has 4 characters.'

Summary

You can think of string concatenation as gluing strings together. And, you can think of string interpolation without strings as injecting strings inside of other strings.

The two ways to build up a bigger string out of smaller strings are, string concatenation, using the + symbol, and string interpolation also known as string formatting, which uses f-strings.

from Planet Python
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