Get the first 2 characters of a string in Python

In this tutorial, we are going to learn about how to get the first 2 characters of a string in Python.

Consider, we have the following string:

str = "abcde"

Get the first 2 characters

To get the first 2 characters of a string in Python, we can use the subscript syntax [ ] by passing 0:2 as an arguments to it.

0 is the starting position of an index.

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

Here is an example:

str = "abcde"

firstTwo = str[0:2] # getting the first 2 charactersprint(firstTwo)

Output:

"ab"

In the example above, we have pass 0:2 to the [], so it begins the extraction at index position 0 and extracts before the 2nd character index.

Thw above syntax can also be written like this:

str = "abcde"

firstTwo = str[:3] # getting the first 2 charactersprint(firstTwo)