[Tutor] working with strings in python3

[Steve Willoughby]

On 18-Apr-11 17:17, Rance Hall wrote:
> if test:
>     message = message + " Humbug!"

> I'm sure this is not the way we are supposed to augment strings like this.
> maybe there is string.append() method or something I should be using instead?


Nope, strings are immutable so once they are instantiated they cannot be 
changed (or lots of things like dictionary keys would break).

So you want to create a new string value by taking the current value of 
message, plus a new value, and assigning that back to the name "message" 
as a new string object:

message = message + " Humbug!"

Although that can be more conveniently written as

message += " Humbug!"

There are other approaches, like building a list of strings and later 
joining them, etc., but that depends on your application as to what 
approach makes most sense for you.

message.append() is impossible because that would be altering the string 
object named by "message" in-place, which is disallowed for strings.

-- 
Steve Willoughby / steve at alchemy.com
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
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