A string can be thought of as a list of characters.
Like any other list, each character in a string has an index. Consider the string:
favorite_fruit = "blueberry"
We can select specific letters from this string using the index. Let’s look at the first letter of the string.
print(favorite_fruit[1]) # Output: l
Whoops, is that the first letter you expected? Notice that the letter at index 1
of "blueberry"
isn’t b
, it’s l
. This is because the indices of a string start at 0
. b
is located at the zero index and we could select it using:
print(favorite_fruit[0]) # Output: b
It’s important to note that indices of strings must be integers. If we were to try to select a non-integer index we would get a TypeError
.
For example:
print(favorite_fruit[1.5])
This would result in:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "script.py", line 3, in <module>
print(favorite_fruit[1.5])
TypeError: string indices must be integers
Instructions
One of the most common things that are represented by strings is names.
Save your name as a string to the variable my_name
.
Select the first letter of the variable my_name
and save it to first_initial
.