Splitting a string is something I find myself doing often. The split method is used for this:

>>> test.split()
['This', 'is', 'just', 'a', 'short', 'string.']

We can choose the point that we split it at:

>>> test.split ( 'a' )
['This is just ', ' short string.']

Rejoining our split string can be done using the join method:

>>> ' some '.join ( test.split ( 'a' ) )
'This is just  some  short string.'

We can play around with the case of letters in our string, too. Let's make it all upper case:

>>> test.upper()
'THIS IS JUST A SHORT STRING.'

Now let's make it lowercase:

>>> test.lower()
'this is just a short string.'

Let's capitalize only the first letter of the lowercase string:

>>> test.lower().capitalize()
'This is just a short string.'

We can also use the title method. This capitalizes the first letter in each word:

>>> test.title()
'This Is Just A Short String.'

Trading case is possible:

>>> test.swapcase()
'tHIS IS JUST A SHORT STRING.'

We can run a number of tests on strings using a few methods. Let's check to see whether a given string is all upper case:

>>> 'UPPER'.isupper()
True
>>> 'UpPEr'.isupper()
False

Likewise, we can check to see whether a string contains only lower case characters:

>>> 'lower'.islower()
True
>>> 'Lower'.islower()
False

Checking whether a string looks like a title is simple, too:

>>> 'This Is A Title'.istitle()
True
>>> 'This is A title'.istitle()
False