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

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# Hints
## General
- The Python Docs [Tutorial for strings][python-str-doc] has an overview of the Python `str` type.
- String methods [`str.join()`][str-join] and [`str.split()`][str-split] ar very helpful when processing strings.
- The Python Docs on [Sequence Types][common sequence operations] 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()`][str-join] is all you need here.
- Like [`str.split()`][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 indexed or 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()`][str-split] returns a `list` of strings broken on white space.
- `lists` are sequences, and can be indexed.
- [`str.split()`][str-split] can be directly indexed: `'Exercism rocks!'.split()[0] == 'Exercism'`
- Be careful of punctuation! Periods can be removed via slice: `'dark.'[:-1] == 'dark'`
[common sequence operations]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#text-sequence-type-str
[python-str-doc]: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/introduction.html#strings
[str-join]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.join
[str-split]: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#str.split