Iterating each character in a string using Python

In C++, I can iterate over an std::string like this:

std::string str = "Hello World!";

for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); ++i)
{
    std::cout << str[i] << std::endl;
}

How do I iterate over a string in Python?

As Johannes pointed out,

for c in "string":
    #do something with c

You can iterate pretty much anything in python using the for loop construct,

for example, open("file.txt") returns a file object (and opens the file), iterating over it iterates over lines in that file

with open(filename) as f:
    for line in f:
        # do something with line

If that seems like magic, well it kinda is, but the idea behind it is really simple.

There's a simple iterator protocol that can be applied to any kind of object to make the for loop work on it.

Simply implement an iterator that defines a next() method, and implement an __iter__ method on a class to make it iterable. (the __iter__ of course, should return an iterator object, that is, an object that defines next())

See official documentation

If you need access to the index as you iterate through the string, use enumerate():

>>> for i, c in enumerate('test'):
...     print i, c
... 
0 t
1 e
2 s
3 t

Even easier:

for c in "test":
    print c

Just to make a more comprehensive answer, the C way of iterating over a string can apply in Python, if you really wanna force a square peg into a round hole.

i = 0
while i < len(str):
    print str[i]
    i += 1

But then again, why do that when strings are inherently iterable?

for i in str:
    print i

Well you can also do something interesting like this and do your job by using for loop

#suppose you have variable name
name = "Mr.Suryaa"
for index in range ( len ( name ) ):
    print ( name[index] ) #just like c and c++ 

Answer is

M r . S u r y a a

However since range() create a list of the values which is sequence thus you can directly use the name

for e in name:
    print(e)

This also produces the same result and also looks better and works with any sequence like list, tuple, and dictionary.

We have used tow Built in Functions ( BIFs in Python Community )

1. range() - range() BIF is used to create indexes Example

   for i in range ( 5 ) : can produce 0 , 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

2. len() - len() BIF is used to find out the length of given string

If you would like to use a more functional approach to iterating over a string (perhaps to transform it somehow), you can split the string into characters, apply a function to each one, then join the resulting list of characters back into a string.

A string is inherently a list of characters, hence 'map' will iterate over the string - as second argument - applying the function - the first argument - to each one.

For example, here I use a simple lambda approach since all I want to do is a trivial modification to the character: here, to increment each character value:

>>> ''.join(map(lambda x: chr(ord(x)+1), "HAL"))
'IBM'

or more generally:

>>> ''.join(map(my_function, my_string))

where my_function takes a char value and returns a char value.

Several answers here use range. xrange is generally better as it returns a generator, rather than a fully-instantiated list. Where memory and or iterables of widely-varying lengths can be an issue, xrange is superior.

You can also do the following:

txt = "Hello World!"
print (*txt, sep='\n')

This does not use loops but internally print statement takes care of it.

* unpacks the string into a list and sends it to the print statement

sep='\n' will ensure that the next char is printed on a new line

The output will be:

H
e
l
l
o
 
W
o
r
l
d
!

If you do need a loop statement, then as others have mentioned, you can use a for loop like this:

for x in txt: print (x)

If you ever run in a situation where you need to get the next char of the word using __next__(), remember to create a string_iterator and iterate over it and not the original string (it does not have the __next__() method)

In this example, when I find a char = [ I keep looking into the next word while I don't find ], so I need to use next

here a for loop over the string wouldn't help

myString = "'string' 4 '['RP0', 'LC0']' '[3, 4]' '[3, '4']'"
processedInput = ""
word_iterator = myString.__iter__()
for idx, char in enumerate(word_iterator):
    if char == "'":
        continue

    processedInput+=char

    if char == '[':
        next_char=word_iterator.__next__()
        while(next_char != "]"):
          processedInput+=next_char
          next_char=word_iterator.__next__()
        else:
          processedInput+=next_char