How to get first n characters of a string in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first n characters of a string in Python.

Consider, we have the following string:

str = "abcde"

Getting the first n characters

To access the first n characters of a string in Python, we can use the subscript syntax [ ] by passing 0:n as an arguments to it.

0 is the starting position of an index.

n is the number of characters we need to extract from the starting position (n is excluded).

Here is an example, that gets the first 3 characters from a string.

str = "abcde"

firstThree = str[0:3] # getting the first 3 charactersprint(firstThree)

Output:

"abc"

The above syntax can also be written like this:

str = "abcde"

firstThree = str[:3] # getting the first 3 charactersprint(firstThree)