tostring() Equivalent in Python

In Python, a string is a sequence of characters. Everything enclosed between quotation marks is considered a string in Python.

Strings are used heavily in almost every programming language. It is a prevalent feature, and every language has different methods to deal with strings. The tostring() function is a common method available in different languages to cast objects of different types into strings.

In Python, the equivalent of the tostring() is the str() function.

The str() is a built-in function. It can convert an object of a different type to a string. When we call this function, it calls the __str__() function internally to get the representation of the object as a string.

The following code shows different examples of this function.

a = 15
l1 = [1, 2, 3]
s_l1 = str(l1)
s_a = str(a)

print(s_a, type(s_a))
print(s_l1, type(s_l1))

Output:

15 <class 'str'>
[1, 2, 3] <class 'str'>

As you can see, we were able to convert a number and a list to string type. It is interesting to see how we can also convert a collection object like a list to a string.

In Python, we have a few methods available to format strings. The format() function is used for this and can also convert objects like numbers to string type.

The following code will show how.

a = 15
l1 = [1, 2, 3]
s_l1 = "{}".format(l1)
s_a = "{}".format(a)

print(s_a, type(s_a))
print(s_l1, type(s_l1))

Output:

15 <class 'str'>
[1, 2, 3] <class 'str'>

In recent versions of Python, we have a new feature called fstring to format a string.

We can use these fstrings for string conversion also. For example,

a = 15
l1 = [1, 2, 3]
s_l1 = f"{l1}"
s_a = f"{a}"

print(s_a, type(s_a))
print(s_l1, type(s_l1))

Output:

15 <class 'str'>
[1, 2, 3] <class 'str'>