How to get the first 2 letters of a string in Python

Question

Let s say I have a string   Str1    TN 81 NZ 0025   str2    DL 11C AA 1111  two   first2 str1  print two   gt  gt  gt TN   How do I get the first two letters of these strings  I need the first2 function for this

User · Answer

All previous examples will raise an exception in case your string is not long enough.

Another approach is to use 'yourstring'.ljust(100)[:100].strip().

This will give you first 100 chars. You might get a shorter string in case your string last chars are spaces.

User · Answer

t    your string    Play with the first N characters of a string with  def firstN s  n 2       return s  n    which is by default equivalent to   t  2

User · Answer

Heres what the simple function would look like   def firstTwo string       return string  2

User · Answer

In python strings are list of characters  but they are not explicitly list type  just list-like  i e  it can be treated like a list   More formally  they re known as sequence  see http   docs python org 2 library stdtypes html sequence-types-str-unicode-list-tuple-bytearray-buffer-xrange     gt  gt  gt  a    foo bar   gt  gt  gt  isinstance a  list  False  gt  gt  gt  isinstance a  str  True   Since strings are sequence  you can use slicing to access parts of the list  denoted by list start index end index  see Explain Python  39 s slice notation   For example    gt  gt  gt  a    1 2 3 4   gt  gt  gt  a 0  1   first element  NOT a sequence   gt  gt  gt  a 0 1   1    a slice from first to second  a list  i e  a sequence   gt  gt  gt  a 0 2   1  2   gt  gt  gt  a  2   1  2    gt  gt  gt  x    foo bar   gt  gt  gt  x 0 2   fo   gt  gt  gt  x  2   fo    When undefined  the slice notation takes the starting position as the 0  and end position as len sequence    In the olden C days  it s an array of characters  the whole issue of dynamic vs static list sounds like legend now  see Python List vs  Array - when to use

User · Answer

to print first two letter of a string str    quot string quot  print str 0 2

User · Answer

In general  you can the characters of a string from i until j with string i j   string  2  is shorthand for string 0 2   This works for arrays as well   Learn about python s slice notation at the official tutorial

User · Answer

For completeness  Instead of using def you could give a name to a lambda function   first2   lambda s  s  2

User · Answer

It is as simple as string  2   A function can be easily written to do it  if you need    Even this  is as simple as  def first2 s       return s  2

[python] How to get the first 2 letters of a string in Python?

Examples related to python

Examples related to string

Examples related to python-2.7