1.

4 Representing Data II: Booleans and

Strings
In the previous section, we studied how we could represent numeric data in Python using two
concrete data types: int and float . In this section, we’ll introduce two new data types that
represent common pieces of individual data, before seeing how to combine multiple pieces of data
together in the next section.

Boolean data
A boolean is a value from the set {True, False}. Think of a boolean value as an answer to a Yes/
No question, for example, “Is this person old enough to vote?”, “Is this country land-locked?”,
and “Is this service free?”. 1
1
The word “boolean” might sound a bit strange! Even though the concepts of “True” and “False” have been around
since humans have existed, the term boolean is named after the logician George Boole (1815–1864), who was an early
pioneer of symbolic logic.

We also saw booleans in the last section as the result of comparison operations. When we write
3 > 2, the value of this expression isn’t a number, but instead a boolean (in this case, True).

In Python, boolean data is represented using the data type bool . Unlike the broad range of
numbers we just saw, there are only two literal values of type bool : True and False .

Operations on boolean data

Booleans can be combined using different kinds of operations. The three most common ones are:

• not: reverses the value of a boolean. “not True” is False, and “not False” is True. In
symbolic logic, this operator is represented by the symbol ¬.

• and: takes two boolean values and produces True when both of the values are True, and
False otherwise. For example, “True and False” is False, while “True and True” is True.
In symbolic logic, this operator is represented by the symbol ∧.

• or: takes two boolean values and produces True when at least one of the values is True,
and False otherwise. For example, “True or False” is True, while “False or False” is
False. In symbolic logic, this operator is represented by the symbol ∨.

One note about the logical or operation is that it is an inclusive or, meaning it produces
True when both of the given boolean values are True. 2
2 This contrasts with exclusive or, which produces True when exactly one of the given values is True. The
exclusive or operation produces False when both of the given values are True. In
Python,
we have three logical operators that correspond to the above operators. Unlike the arithmetic and
comparison operators we learned about in the last section, Python’s logical operators are written as
common English words rather than symbols: not , and , and or . 3
3
The choice to use English words rather than symbols was made to improve the readability of Python code. We hope
you appreciate this aspect of the language when going through the following examples!

>>> not True

False
>>> True and True
True
>>> True and False
False
>>> False or True
True
>>> False or False
False

Just as we saw how arithmetic operator expressions can be nested within each other, we can
combine logical operator expressions, and even include arithmetic comparison operators:

>>> True and (False or True)

True
>>> (3 == 4) or (5 > 10) # Both (3 == 4) and (5 > 10) evaluate to False
False

Next week, we’ll discuss these logical operators in more detail and introduce a few others.

Textual data (strings)

Our second new data type in this section is used to represent text: everything from names to chat
logs to the text of of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We represent text using the string data type,
which is a sequence of characters. 4 We use the word character and not letter because the set of all
4 One of the English definitions of the word “string” is a sequence of items.

characters extends far beyond any one alphabet (a, b, c, etc.). Here are examples of other types of
characters that you have encountered before:

• numeric digits (0, 1, 2, etc.)

• letters and glyphs from languages other than English (e.g., ‫ﻱ‬, ξ, 你)
• punctuation marks and symbols (such as the period (.) and at symbol @)
• spaces
• emojis (e.g., , , )5
5 In case you’re wondering, we copied these emoji characters from https://emojipedia.org/.
All Python code is text that we type into the computer, so how do we distinguish between text
that’s code and text that’s data, like a person’s name? In Python, we represent strings using the
str data type. 6 A str literal is a sequence of characters surrounded by single-quotes ( ' ). 7 For

6 Just as int is a short form of “integer”, str is a short form of “string”.

7 Python allows string literals to be written using either single-quotes or double-quotes ( " ). You’re free to use either
in your own code, but these notes and other course materials will use single-quotes to match how the Python console
displays strings.

example, we could write this course’s name in Python as the string literal 'Foundations of
Computer Science I' . Here are some examples of writing string literals in the Python console.

>>> 'Foundations of Computer Science I'

'Foundations of Computer Science I'
>>> 'I '
'I '
>>> ''
''

That last example is interesting: it is an empty string, a string with no characters. This is perfectly
allowed in Python, and is a surprisingly common value to see when processing text data—for
example, working with survey data in which a participant left a question blank.

Operations on strings
While there are many different kinds of operations we can perform on strings, we’ll only look at a
few common ones right now.

The first is string equality. Two strings are equal when they have the same characters, in the same
order. In Python, we can compare strings using the == operator, just like we could for int s and
float s.

>>> 'David' == 'David'

True
>>> 'hi' == 'bye'
False

Because uppercase and lowercase letters are represented in Python as different characters, they are
not considered equal when comparing strings. We say that string equality is case-sensitive.

>>> 'Mario' == 'mario'

False

Finally, string equality requires an exact match of all characters in both strings, so there can’t be
any “leftover” characters:

>>> 'David' == 'David Liu'

False

This brings us to our second string operation, substring search. This operation takes two strings s
and t, and returns whether the string s appears somewhere inside of t. If this is true, we say that s
is a substring of t. In Python, we can write a substring search expression using a new operator
called in .

>>> 'm' in 'computer' # single character search

True
>>> 'x' in 'computer'
False
>>> 'put' in 'computer' # multiple character search
True
>>> 'pur' in 'computer' # False, because characters must appear
consecutively
False
>>> 'computer' in 'computer' # every string is a substring of itself
True
>>> '' in 'computer' # the empty string is a substring of every string
True

Our next string operation gives us ways of building up larger strings from smaller strings. The
string concatenation operation takes two strings s1 and s2 and returns a new string consisting of
the characters of s1 followed by the characters of s2. In Python, this is represented using the same
+ operator as for arithmetic addition. 8

8 So just as we saw how == can be used on values of different types in Python, so too can + . The designers of the
Python programming language tried to reuse operators when possible to reduce the amount of different operators
programmers would have to learn. This is great for beginners, but also means that you’ll need to pay attention to what
the types of the values in an operation are, because the same operator will do different things depending on those types!

And Python supports concatenation using the familiar + operator:

>>> 'David' + 'Mario'

'DavidMario'
>>> 'David ' + 'Mario' # Extra space after
David
'David Mario'
>>> 'Mario' + 'David ' # Order matters!
'MarioDavid '

The final operation we’ll cover in this section is string indexing. This operation takes a string s and
a natural number i, and produces the i-th character of s, where the counting starts at 0. 9 This
9
Typically we’re used to counting starting at 1 (“first”, “second”, “third”, etc.). But due to how most programming
languages, including Python, are designed, it is a very strong convention to have indexing of all sequences start at 0.
We’ll keep reminding you of this in the first few chapters because it can be a bit strange, but eventually you will get
used to it!

operation is denoted s[i], so s[0] returns the first character of s, s[1] returns the second, etc. We
use the same syntax with square brackets in Python as well, as in the following examples.
>>> 'David'[0] # Remember, indexing starts
at 0
'D'
>>> 'David'[1]
'a'
>>> 'David'[2]
'v'
>>> 'David'[3]
'i'
>>> 'David'[4]
'd'

References
• CSC108 videos: Type bool (Part
Part
Part111,
Part 1 Part
Part
Part222,
2 Part
Part
Part333,
3 Part
Part
Part444)
4
Part
Part
Part111,
• CSC108 videos: Type str (Part 1 Part
Part
Part222)
2
Appendix
• Appendix A.2
AppendixA.2 Python
A.2Python Built-In
PythonBuilt-In Data
Built-InData Types
DataTypes Reference
TypesReference
Reference

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