Negative Indexing and Length

You can also index from the end of the string. In this case, the last element has an index of -1, the second-to-last is -2, and so on.


              1234
            
# Initial string
site = "codefinity"
# Get the letters 'y' and 'f'
print(site[-1], site[-6])

Note

Keep in mind that -1 is the go-to way to access the last element.

Now that you're familiar with referencing characters in a string, you might wonder how to determine the total number of characters in that string. Fortunately, Python provides the len() function for that. Just pass the string or the variable holding the string as an argument.


              1234
            
# Initial string
site = "codefinity"
# Get the string length
print(len(site))

As you might notice, the length of a string corresponds to the number of characters in it. Thus, the total count of characters in a string is always one greater than the index of its last character. For instance, if the length of a string is 10, the index of its last character is 9.

Note

You can also determine the index of the last character by using len(string) - 1.

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Section 2. Chapter 9