How to Display a Snippet of a Text in Python

In this article, we show how to display a snippet of a text in Python.

A snippet is just a portion or the first part of a text.

We may do this if we only want to show the first 100 characters of a text or only the first 200 characters of a text, and so on.

How can we do this?

We can do this with indexing.

Realize that the first index of a string is at the index location of 0.

If we want to show the first 100 characters of the string, then we can specify string[:100]

This will show the index of 0 all the way to the index of 99 (since what comes after the colon is exclusive). Thus, we show the first 100 characters of the text.

As an example below, we have a fairly long piece of text.

By using indexing in Python, we are able to show how ever many characters we want of the string. In our example code, we will show the first 100 charactesr of the string.

>>> string1= "I went to the store yesterday. The store was really big and seemed like it was recently renovated. The ceiling was really high; it probably was like 200 feet tall. The lights above were very bright. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling. The shelves were also really high, so high I don't think the average customer could reach it." >>> snippet= string1[:100] >>> snippet 'I went to the store yesterday. The store was really big and seemed like it was recently renovated. T'

So it's very basic. We have a variable called string1, which is set to a certain text.

We then have another variable, snippet, which is set equal to, string1[:100]

This variable, snippet, then holds the first 100 characters of the variable, string1.

We then show the output of the snippet variable and get a snippet (portion) of the string1 variable.

So this is how we can show a snippet of a text in Python.

Related Resources

How to Randomly Select From or Shuffle a List in Python