Text Practice

These questions follow Working with Text. Text typed by a person is never as tidy as text typed by you, and every question here is a small version of a bug that has genuinely broken somebody’s program.

Reading text

1. With title = "Fifteen Dogs", what does each print? len(title), title[0], title[-1], title[0:7].
2. Why is " Priya " == "Priya" False, and what one method call fixes it?
3. What do each of these produce: "14".isdigit(), "3.5".isdigit(), " 14".isdigit(), "".isdigit()? What does .isdigit() actually test?
4. Find the fault.

   name = "priya"
   name[0] = "P"

Working with text

5. A saved line looks like Fifteen Dogs|14. Split it into the title and the number of days, and print the number of days plus one.
6. A sign-in check should accept PRIYA, priya, and Priya . Write the condition.
7. Given full = "Priya Nair", print the initials PN.
8. Challenge. Count the vowels in "Fifteen Dogs", ignoring case.

Answers

Answer 1

12, F, s, Fifteen. The space counts as a character, and the slice [0:7] runs from position 0 up to but not including position 7 — the same “up to but not including” rule as range.

Answer 2

The spaces are characters, so the two strings are genuinely different values. .strip() removes whitespace from both ends:

typed = "  Priya  "
print(typed.strip() == "Priya")

That prints True. Strip anything that came from input() before comparing it — always.

Answer 3

True, False, False, False. It tests whether every character is a digit and there is at least one — so a decimal point, a leading space, a minus sign, or an empty line all make it False. That is exactly why it is useful as a guard before int().

Answer 4

Strings are immutable — you cannot change one character in place:

TypeError: 'str' object does not support item assignment

Build a new string instead:

name = "priya"
name = name[0].upper() + name[1:]
print(name)

That prints Priya. Every string method returns a new string; the original is never edited.

Answer 5

line = "Fifteen Dogs|14"
fields = line.split("|")
title = fields[0]
days = int(fields[1])
print(days + 1)

15

.split("|") returns a list of strings — including "14", which is still text until int() converts it. This is exactly how a line read back from a file becomes usable data.

Answer 6

typed = input("Name: ")
name = typed.strip().lower()
 
if name == "priya":
    print("Signed in.")

Clean first, compare second. Comparing lower-case to lower-case handles the capitals; the .strip() handles the space bar. Note that the stored comparison value is written in lower case too — mixing that up is a fifteen-minute bug.

Answer 7

full = "Priya Nair"
parts = full.split(" ")
initials = parts[0][0] + parts[1][0]
print(initials)

PN

parts[0][0] reads as “first word, first character”. This version assumes exactly two words — which is a real assumption about people’s names, and a bad one to leave unexamined; see the accessibility section of Computers and Society.

Answer 8

count = 0
for letter in "Fifteen Dogs".lower():
    if letter in "aeiou":
        count = count + 1
print(count)

4

A for loop over a string gives you one character at a time, and in asks whether that character appears in the vowel string. The .lower() means a capital I or O is counted too.