6: Strings and Text

While you have been writing strings, you still do not know what they do. In this exercise we create a bunch of variables with complex strings so you can see what they are for. First an explanation of strings.

A string is usually a bit of text you want to display to someone or "export" out of the program you are writing. Python knows you want something to be a string when you put either " (double-quotes) or ' (single-quotes) around the text. You saw this many times with your use of print when you put the text you want to go inside the string inside " or ' after the print to print the string.

Strings can contain any number of variables that are in your Python script. Remember that a variable is any line of code where you set a name = (equal) to a value. In the code for this exercise, types_of_people = 10 creates a variable named types_of_people and sets it = (equal) to 10. You can put that in any string with {types_of_people}. You also see that I have to use a special type of string to "format"; it's called an "f-string" and looks like this: