Accessing characters in Python

Each character in a string has a numbered position known as its index. We access a character by referring to its index number.

Strings use zero-based indexing, so the first character in a string has an index of 0, the second character has an index of 1, etc.

We’re using bracket notation ([]) with the index after the name of the string to access the character:

message = "Hello world!"

print(message[0]) # Output: H
print(message[1]) # Output: e
print(message[6]) # Output: w

Whitespaces have indices:

Note that every character inside the quotes (including whitespaces) is part of the string and has its own index. For example, in string "Hello world!", the whitespace is placed on index 5.

However, if you run this code:

message = "Hello world!"

print(message[5])

you would see that nothing was printed to the console, not a whitespace and not even a new line as print() always does.

This is because print() refuses to print strings consisting only of whitespaces for some reason. It just disregards them.

But don't get tricked by this, that whitespace exists and it's on index 5. You can see that clearly when you run this code:

message = "Hello world!"

print(message[4] + message[5] + message[6])

the output is:

o w

Assignment
Follow the Coding Tutorial and let's access some characters!

Hint
Look at the examples above if you get stuck.