Do you have a gigantic string that you need to parse for information? Do you need to sanitize a user’s input to work in a function? Do you need to be able to generate outputs with variable values? All of these things can be accomplished with string methods!

Python comes with built-in string methods that give you the power to perform complicated tasks on strings very quickly and efficiently. These string methods allow you to change the case of a string, split a string into many smaller strings, join many small strings together into a larger string, and allow you to neatly combine changing variables with string outputs.

In the previous lesson, you worked with len(), which was a function that determined the number of characters in a string. This, while similar, was NOT a string method. String methods all have the same syntax:

string_name.string_method(arguments)

Unlike len(), which is called with a string as its argument, a string method is called at the end of a string and each one has its own method specific arguments.