Introduction One of the first things you encounter while learning the basics of programming is the concept of strings. Similar to various programming languages, Python strings are arrays of bytes representing Unicode characters – an array or sequence of characters. Python, unlike many programming languages, doesn’t have a distinct character datatype, and characters are considered strings of length 1. You can define a string using single or double quotation marks, for example, a = “Hello World” or a = ‘Hello […]

Introduction In this article, we’ll be going through a few examples of how to check if a variable is a number in Python. Python is dynamically typed. There is no need to declare a variable type, while instantiating it – the interpreter infers the type at runtime: variable = 4 another_variable = ‘hello’ Additionally, a variable can be reassigned to a new type at any given time: # Assign a numeric value variable = 4 # Reassign a string value […]

Introduction Python has a set of built-in library objects and functions to help us with this task. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to check if a file or directory is empty in Python. Distinguish Between a File and a Directory When we’d like to check if a path is empty or not, we’ll want to know if it’s a file or directory since this affects the approach we’ll want to use. Let’s say we have two placeholder variables dirpath […]

Introduction Replacing all or n occurrences of a substring in a given string is a fairly common problem of string manipulation and text processing in general. Luckily, most of these tasks are made easy in Python by its vast array of built-in functions, including this one. Let’s say, we have a string that contains the following sentence: The brown-eyed man drives a brown car. Our goal is to replace the word “brown” with the word “blue”: The blue-eyed man drives […]

Introduction String padding refers to adding, usually, non-informative characters to a string to one or both ends of it. This is most often done for output formatting and alignment purposes, but it can have useful practical applications. A frequent use case for padding strings is outputting table-like information in a table-like fashion. You can do this in a variety of ways, including using Pandas to convert your data to an actual table. This way, Python would handle the output formatting […]