Session 15 Preparation — Videos, Reading and Quizzes

Do this Quiz on Session 15 as you read the textbook and the web page on formatting. Print it and complete it using pencil or pen, or fill it in electronically — your choice.

Here is the quiz in Microsoft Word in case you want to fill it in electronically in that format.
Strings
- Textbook reading: Section 2.4 — Strings (pages 48-54). We have already encountered many things form this section, but there are several new things in this section as well.
  - As you read, focus your attention on:
    - Concatenation (+) and repetition (+) operators (pages 49-50).
    - Conversion to and from strings, using the str, int, and float functions (page 50).
    - Individual characters of strings (pages 50-52). Remember the existence of the table of string operations for future reference.
    - String methods (pages 52-53). Recall that Python strings are immutable, so all string methods create and return new strings.
    - Representing strings on a computer: ASCII, escape sequences, and Unicode (pages 53-54).
- Supplementary reading: List of all Python string methods (http://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#string-methods).
  - Quickly look through the list, to get an idea of the rich collection of functions that are available.
  - Read the details of a few of them: capitalize, center, find, index, isalpha and other is ... methods, join, strip, replace, split.
    If you do not understand some of these methods from the brief descriptions on that page, use your favorite internet search engine to find more detailed descriptions of examples of a particular method.
- Supplementary reading: Formatting strings (Section 8.16 from http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/strings.html).
  We recommend that you skim this entire document, stopping to focus on parts that are new to you.
  If you can't figure out something on the quiz, you may find the answer somewhere in this Chapter 8 document. But pay special attention to section 16 on formatting.
  
  Note about our textbook's approach to formatting: We believe that our otherwise outstanding textbook fell down on the job on this topic. In Section 2.5.3, it describes the "old style Python" approach to formatting. The modern approach is a little bit harder to learn, but much more flexible and unambiguous. That is why we are directing you to this different document.