new to site and python

[Kasrav]

i dnt have much access to the internet so thats why i take long to reply sorry about that. strings are a big headache fro me so i dnt know if u could give any ideas of how to go about them e.g, if i had to write a program where u have to enter a phrase and then the program calculates and outputs the acronym derived from that phrase. all help appreaciated thanks

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[dshimer]

Here are a couple of things to look at. You could take the phrase and separate it into a list of words using split()

>>> p='this is a phrase'
>>> p.split()
['this', 'is', 'a', 'phrase']

Then you could use a for loop to pull out the first letter of each word. Remember that the first letter of a string has an index of 0, second is 1, etc.

>>> for w in p.split():
...     print w[0]
...     
t
i
a
p

In this example I just printed the letter, but you could build a new word out of it (lets use a for acronym)

>>> a=''
>>> for w in p.split():
...     a=a+w[0]
... 
>>> print a
tiap

or if you wanted it all upper case

>>> print a.upper()
TIAP

Some of these methods have been listed as deprecated in the python docs, which I don't study enough to know why. Could someone say where to look for the new methods, I understand that things like string.atof() became float() which makes sense to me. However I don't understand how to replace some of the others listed at http://docs.python.org/lib/node42.html. In this post I use string.upper(), what would be correct?