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Start your free trialYoel Dovid Cohen
13,405 Pointshow to run an if on a string
I am doing the challenge "Continental" and it is telling me to find the continents that begins with "A". How do I do this? Thank you
continents = [
'Asia',
'South America',
'North America',
'Africa',
'Europe',
'Antarctica',
'Australia',
]
# Your code here
for continent in continents:
if continent > "A":
print("* " + continent)
1 Answer
Alex Koumparos
Python Development Techdegree Student 36,887 PointsHi yc5,
Strings behave, in most respects, like lists. For example, just like we could do this with a list:
my_list = ['h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o']
my_list[1] # will access the element at index 1, i.e., 'e'
We can do the same thing with a string:
my_string = "hello"
my_string[1] # will access the character at index 1: 'e'
Now we know how to access an element at a position, we can put that in the if
statement:
my_string = "hello"
if my_string[1] == "e":
print("the character is 'e'")
Often, when dealing with strings, we want our tests to be case insensitive. One way we can do this is to ensure that regardless of the case we are being passed, we only look at the lowercase version of it:
my_string = "hELlO"
if my_string[1].lower() == "e":
print(my_string[1])
Hope that clears everything up for you
Cheers
Alex