In this tutorial, we will be discussing an important concept in python. This is the fact that we can used indices as an integer and not strings. If you try to access a iterable object using a string value, an error will return and it might look something like “TypeError: String Indices Must Be Integers.”
This can be very confusing for beginners because they might not know what’s going on or why the error is happening. In this article, we will discuss what causes this error as well as how to fix it so you can continue coding without any worries!
Table of Contents
String Indices
String index must be integers in Python
If you are a python programmer, then you should know the importance of string index. But what is it? String index lets us access any iterable object with the help of an integer. If we try to access the iterable object with the help of a string, an error will be raised. Error shows – “TypeError: string indices must be integers.”
All characters have their unique position in strings which can be identified by their indexes. The problem arises when we use non-integers as indexes because these cannot identify each character’s position. We need to make sure that all our indexes are integers or else Python will throw errors for this type of situation.
Example 01: Access a String Index
A string in Python is a sequence of characters. A byte string, on the other hand, has no predetermined length. It can be any number of bytes long. One indexing scheme for strings is to use zero-based offsets–that is, the first character will have offset 0 and the last character will have an offset equal to one less than the length of the string.
Code
string = "CodeLeaks"
c = string["c"]
print(c) Output
Example 02: Access a Float Index
Accessing a float index is an integral part of programming. So, in this blog post we will take an input string as str. And then try to access the string with the help of float value as their index. Then, we will see the output for better understanding. Let us look at the example and understand it in detail!
Code
string = "CodeLeaks"
c = string[0.3]
print(c) Output
Solution
A very common error that we all come across while programming is “indices must be integers not strings”. The only solution for this problem is to pass the index value as an integer. As, unlike strings which can be accessed with any value of the iterable object, the index values are limited and need to be passed in an integer format.
Let us look at a simple example to understand this concept better:
Code
string = "CodeLeaks"
c = string[0]
print(c) Output
Conclusion
Finally, we have reached the conclusion of this tutorial! We hope that you learned something new about string indices and how they should be integers.
