1. Set your Learning Objectives to red.

2. We are going to save all of our work for this topic into this PowerPoint.

To download the PowerPoint by clicking on the image below



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3. Save your PowerPoint as 'Programming 1'

Using Strings

A string is any sequence of characters from the keyboard, including digits, letters, and any other characters you can see on your keyboard. It is an important data type/structure used in programming to achieve many different things.

Let's look back at some previous code we used when we were learning how to input data

What we are going to do now is also tell the user how many letters are in their name. To do that we have the use the len() function.

Here is an example

Activity 1

1. Can you ouput the length of the following strings:

1. Elephant
2. Impossible
3. This is a sentence

2. Can you add them all together to give the total number of characters used in all three strings?

Extension Activity 1

1. Get the user to enter a word and tell them how many characters are in the word they enter?

Wouldn't it be good if we could find out where in the string a character appears. Don’t forget it will start counting from 0.

In this example, it will find the letter "p" in the word "Simple" and display the number of it's position.

Activity 2

1. Can you find the position of the letter e in the following strings:

1. Elephant
2. Impossible
3. This is a sentence

2. What happens if you look for a letter that is not in the word?

Extension Activity 2

1. Create a word and ask the user to guess if a letter is in the word, if it, is output the position of the letter, if it is not say that letter is not in the word. Think of this like the game hangman.

In your Powerpoint put a screenshot of your code.

The reason we have to start counting from 0 when look for the position of a chracter in a string is because strings are like lists.

The code below shows you that we can output a character in our string just like we did when we outputted an element in our list:

Notice how we use the index value to access the value in our string just like we did withlists.

Activity 3

1. Copy the code below.

2. Can you ouput just the letter 'e' from each of the variables that are storing the different strings?

Extension Activity 3

1. Can you create a hangman game?

In your Powerpoint put a screenshot of your code.

Summing it all up

Lets look at the learning outcomes and decide which one best describes our current level of understanding :

Tick the one you feel is closest to your level