Page 71 - Python Basics: A Practical Introduction to Python 3

4.2. Concatenation, Indexing, and Slicing

In this section, you’ll learn about three basic string operations:

1. Concatenation, which joins two strings together
2. Indexing, which gets a single character from a string
3. Slicing, which gets several characters from a string at once

Let’s dive in!

String Concatenation

You can combine, or concatenate, two strings using the + operator:

>>> string1 = "abra"
>>> string2 = "cadabra"
>>> magic_string = string1 + string2
>>> magic_string
'abracadabra'

In this example, the string concatenation occurs on the third line. You
concatenate string1 and string2 using +, and then you assign the re-
sult to the variable magic_string. Notice that the two strings are joined
without any whitespace between them.

You can use string concatenation to join two related strings, such as
joining a first name and a last name into a full name:

>>> first_name = "Arthur"
>>> last_name = "Dent"
>>> full_name = first_name + " " + last_name
>>> full_name
'Arthur Dent'

Here, you use string concatenation twice on the same line. First, you
concatenate first_name with " " to ensure a space appears after the
first name in the final string. This produces the string "Arthur ", which
you then concatenate with last_name to produce the full name "Arthur
Dent".

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