Recipes: String processing

Short, task-focused how-tos for the string-handling jobs that come up over and over. Each recipe assumes you already know the basics — if a method surprises you, the Learn section is one click away.

Unlike the tutorials, the recipes don't have a recommended order. Pick whichever is useful right now.

Recipes in this guide

• Clean and normalise text — stripping whitespace, fixing case, normalising Unicode, and handling the rough edges of real-world text.
• Parse structured strings — splitting key-value pairs, dotted paths, and other lightly structured input without reaching for a parser.
• Use string templates — string.Template for safer user-facing substitution, and when to prefer it over f-strings.
• Avoid common string mistakes — silent encoding bugs, mutability surprises, and the methods people misuse.