Strings can be manipulated by operators for concatenation +, selecting slices [], and membership within and not in.
The special __doc__ attribute can contain a “docstring” describing a module, function, class, or method.
Python’s built-in dir() function can be useful to examine the names of functions and variables defined in a module.
The __builtins__ module contains functions and variables that are available by default, such as the print() function.
A str object has a format() method for string formatting, and many methods for string modification, such as capitalize(). •Unicode character encoding is used by default, but this can be changed with the str object’s encode() and decode() methods.
The Unicode data module provides a name() method that reveals the Unicodename of each character.
A file object has open(), read(), write(), and close() methods for working with files,and features that describe the file properties.
The open() method must specify a file name string argument and a file mode string argument, such as ’r’ to read the file. •Position in a file, at which to read or write, can be specified with the seek()method and reported by the tell() method.
The Python with keyword groups file operational statements within a block and automatically closes an open file.
The process of “pickling” objects stores a string representation of an object that can later be “unpickled” to its former state.
A pickle object’s dump() method requires arguments to specify an object for conversion, and a file name in which to store data.
Stored object data can be retrieved by specifying the file name in which it is stored to the pickle object’s load() method.