String methods
Clean up a little text
Lesson 8 of 20 · 8 min · Module 3: Working with collections
Text rarely arrives in exactly the shape your program needs. String methods let you clean it up without rewriting the original value.
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By the end, you’ll be able to…
- Split and rejoin text
- Distinguish whitespace splitting from a literal separator
- Keep normalization rules explicit
The idea
split() without an argument separates words on whitespace and ignores repeated whitespace. " ".join(words) joins words with one space. title() capitalizes words.
text = " small steps "
print(" ".join(text.split())) # small steps01Let split handle whitespace
With no separator, split treats runs of spaces, tabs, and line breaks as separators. An empty or whitespace-only string produces an empty list.
02Use title casing for this exercise
title provides a predictable demonstration of a string method. Real people’s names have varied capitalization rules, so production forms should generally respect the spelling a person provides.
Your turn
clean_name(text) to remove extra whitespace and title-case the words. For " aLEX mORGAN ", return "Alex Morgan".What the checks look for
- Normalizes spaces and capitalization
- Handles tabs and line breaks
- Handles empty input
Take this with you
Choose a normalization rule to fit the data, rather than changing text blindly.