exercism/python/little-sisters-vocab/HINTS.md

Hints

General

• The Python Docs Tutorial for strings has an overview of the Python str type.
• String methods .join() and .split() ar very helpful when processing strings.
• The Python Docs on Sequence Types has a rundown of operations common to all sequences, including strings, lists, tuples, and ranges.

There's four activities in the assignment, each with a set of text or words to work with.

1. Add a prefix to a word

• Small strings can be concatenated with the + operator.

2. Add prefixes to word groups

• Believe it or not, <str>.join() is all you need.
• Like <str>.split(), <str>.join() can take an arbitrary-length string, made up of any unicode code points.

3. Remove a suffix from a word

• Strings can be both indexed and sliced from either the left (starting at 0) or the right (starting at -1).
• If you want the last code point of an arbitrary-length string, you can use [-1].
• The last three letters in a string can be "sliced off" using a negative index. e.g. 'beautiful'[:-3] == 'beauti'

4. Extract and transform a word

• Using <str>.split() returns a list of strings broken on white space.
• lists are sequences, and can be indexed.
• <str>.split() can be direcly indexed. e.g. 'Exercism rocks!'.split()[0] == 'Exercism'
• Be careful of punctuation! Periods can be removed via slice: 'dark.'[:-1] == 'dark'