A series of characters designated as one object is known as a string. As seen in previous tutorials, both strings and numbers can be given as values for variables. To designate a string in Python, surround a desired series of characters with either single quotes (' ') or double quotes (" "). Ex: 'five' or "the romans" are both strings in Python.
Any combination of letters, numbers, spaces, and/or special characters can be designated as a string, so a full sentence with spaces between words that ends in a question mark is a valid string in Python if surrounded in single or double quotes. Ex: 'Did you go to the store?'
Further single quotes, apostrophes, and double quotes are allowed within a string, however, the string must end in the same type of quote with which it was started. Ex: "Why my teeth are all a-hurtin' for now?" is a valid string but "Why my teeth are all a hurtin' for now?' is not a valid string and will produce an error.
Interestingly, you can use mathematical operators such as "+" and "*" on strings: the former is a concatenation operator, and the latter works as a "multi-copy concatenation operator". See the interactive shell session.
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Are you using the command-line history shortcuts (Win: Alt + p/n, Mac: Ctrl + p/n)? You should. Soon the Python commands will start getting longer, and if you mistype a command it is much easier to bring up the old command and edit it than retype the entire thing.
Operators such as "+" and "*" work on multiple data types including integers, floats and strings. Depending on the argument data type, they do different things. For example, "+" in 6 + 6 is a addition operator, but "+" in 'boy' + 'friend' is a concatenation operator and yields 'boyfriend' as the return value. These operators are called "overloaded" operators: you will need to pay close attention to the data type of the arguments you supply.
Since we are linguists, we will be working heavily with strings. There are tons of handy operations ("methods") defined on strings. The first part is available here: String Methods Part 1, and the second part: String Methods Part 2.