20.4. The string module

20.4. The `string` module

This module contains additional features for manipulating strings.

20.4.1. Variables in the `string` module

Variables defined in the string module include:

digits: The string "0123456789".
lowercase: A string containing all the lowercase letters, "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".
uppercase: A string containing all the uppercase letters, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ".
letters: The concatenation of lowercase and uppercase.
punctuation: String of characters that are considered punctuation marks: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / : ; < = > ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~
whitespace: Characters considered whitespace, generally " \t\n\r\f\v".
printable: String containing all the printable characters, the union of letters, digits, punctuation, and whitespace.
octdigits: The string "01234567".
hexdigits: "0123456789abcdefABCDEF".

20.4.2. Functions in the `string` module

In addition to the variables and functions in this module, there are a large number of functions that duplicate the built-in methods on strings. For example, instead of

s.split(",", 1)

you can get the same function with

import string
string.split(s, ",", 1)

In general, for any built-in method

s.m(arg₁,arg₂,...),

you can import the string module and get the same effect with

string.m(s,arg₁,arg₂,...),

Additional functions include:

maketrans(s,t)

Builds a translation table to be used as the first argument to the S.translate() string method. The arguments s and t are two strings of the same length; the result is a translation table that will convert each character of s to the corresponding character of t.

Here's an example:

>>> import string
>>> bingo=string.maketrans("lLrR", "rRlL")
>>> "Cornwall Llanfair".translate(bingo)
'Colnwarr Rranfail'

join(L[,d])

L must be a sequence. Returns a string containing the members of the sequence with copies of string d inserted between them. The default value of d is one space. For example, string.join(['baked', 'beans, 'are', 'off']) returns the string 'baked beans are off'.

Python 2.2 quick reference