Chapter 8. Strings and Serialization
Before we get involved with higher level design patterns, let's take a deep dive into one of Python's most common objects: the string. We'll see that there is a lot more to the string than meets the eye, and also cover searching strings for patterns and serializing data for storage or transmission.
In particular, we'll visit:
- The complexities of strings, bytes, and byte arrays
- The ins and outs of string formatting
- A few ways to serialize data
- The mysterious regular expression
Strings
Strings are a basic primitive in Python; we've used them in nearly every example we've discussed so far. All they do is represent an immutable sequence of characters. However, though you may not have considered it before, "character" is a bit of an ambiguous word; can Python strings represent sequences of accented characters? Chinese characters? What about Greek, Cyrillic, or Farsi?
In Python 3, the answer is yes. Python strings...
