Step 5 - Learn how to merge Strings

Theory

Imagine you have a box of puzzle pieces, and each piece contains a part of a picture. To see the complete picture, you need to join all the pieces together. Similarly, when you merge strings in Python, you’re essentially combining different pieces of text to form a cohesive whole.

You might be wondering, why do you even need to merge strings? The answer is that very often we need to produce some text, where some pieces are created dynamically. For example, we need to send an email to 100 people. We wrote a core content and we would like to personalize each email by adding someone’s name into emails greeting. We can do something like:

Dear {NAME}

We have wonderful news, click here to learn more!

There are different methods to merge two or more strings, but in this tutorial we’ll focus on string concatenation.

Example #1

With string concatenation method we simply put the + sign between strings we would like to merge:

print('my name ' + "is " + "Python")

Here is what happens:

• We defined 3 different strings
• All these strings are merged by the + sign in the order we have defined
• The merged string then printed by the print() function

Python Strings concatenation example visualized

Notice that I added extra space at the end of 'my name ' and "is ". Without them it would result in "my nameisPython".

Example #2

Let’s now merge strings where one of them is dynamically created by a user. For that we’ll use the input() function.

name = input('what is your name?: ')
print('Hello ' + name + '!')

Here is what happens:

• We ask a user to enter their name using input() function
• The user’s name is stored in the name variable
• The name is placed between Hello and ! strings and then all 3 strings are merged
• The merged string then printed by the print() function

Python Strings concatenation with input function example visualized

Practice.

Let’s modify a bit our calculator.

• Re-use the code we wrote in the previous Step
• Use string concatenation so it will print it like this: You entered NUMBER_1 and NUMBER_2
• Where NUMBER_1 and NUMBER_2 are the actual numbers a user enters.
• The result should look like this:

  enter first number: 70
  enter second number: 7
  You entered 70 and 7
  

Solution

number_1 = input('enter first number: ')
number_2 = input('enter second number: ')
print('You entered ' + number_1 + ' and ' + number_2)

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