Working with strings

Most data cleaning is string work: trimming spaces, fixing case, splitting fields apart and building new text.

python

name = "  Priya Sharma "

clean = name.strip().lower()

print(clean)

print(clean.split(" "))

print("2026-10-04".replace("-", "/"))

city = "Pune"

print(f"{clean} lives in {city}")

OUTPUT

priya sharma ['priya', 'sharma'] 2026/10/04 priya sharma lives in Pune

Method	What it does
`.strip()`	Removes spaces from both ends
`.lower()` / `.upper()`	Changes the case
`.split(sep)`	Breaks text into a list at `sep`
`.replace(a, b)`	Swaps every `a` for `b`
`f"...{x}..."`	Puts the value of `x` inside the text

watch out "Pune" == "pune " is False. Untrimmed, inconsistently cased strings cause a lot of failed joins and duplicate rows. Normalise them early.