Given a string S = " CARPE DIEM". If n is length/2 (length is the length of the given string), then what would following return?

Question

(a) S[: n]

(b) S[n :]

(c) S[n : n]

(d) S[1 : n]

(e) S[n : length - 1]

Answer 1

These are all examples of slicing. Strings in python allow the user to slice them into chunks. For instance, if our string

a = "CARPE DIEM"

we would be able to get slices like this:

a[0:1] # this is 'C'

a[0:5] # this is "CARPE"

# these are all in the form <String>[<start>:<end>]

When Python sees a slice which is missing a start or end argument, it fills in defaults -- the start is assumed to be 0 and the end is assumed to be the last value in the string (which we can call -1).

a[:5] # this is "CARPE"

a[6:] # this is "DIEM"

a[0:5] == a[:5] # both of these are "CARPE"

a[6:-1] == a[:-1]

you should be able to use this knowledge to check the answers to these in Python on your computer.