Length¶
The len
function, when applied to a string, returns the number of characters in a string.
To get the last letter of a string, you might be tempted to try something like this:
That won’t work. It causes the runtime error
IndexError: string index out of range
. The reason is that there is no
letter at index position 6 in "Banana"
.
Since we started counting at zero, the six indexes are
numbered 0 to 5. To get the last character, we have to subtract 1 from
length
. Give it a try in the example above.
Typically, a Python programmer will access the last character by combining the two lines of code from above.
lastch = fruit[len(fruit)-1]
Check your understanding
- 11
- The blank space counts as a character.
- 12
- Yes, there are 12 characters in the string.
rec-5-1: What is printed by the following statements?
s = "python rocks"
print(len(s))