The Original string Module (Gone in 3.0)

The history of Python’s string methods is somewhat convoluted. For roughly the first decade of its existence, Python provided a standard library module called string that contained functions that largely mirrored the current set of string object methods. In response to user requests, in Python 2.0 these functions were made available as methods of string objects. Because so many people had written so much code that relied on the original string module, however, it was retained for backward compatibility.

Today, you should use only string methods, not the original string module. In fact, the original module-call forms of today’s string methods have been removed completely from Python in Release 3.0. However, because you may still see the module in use in older Python code, a brief look is in order here.

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The upshot of this legacy is that in Python 2.6, there technically are still two ways to invoke advanced string operations: by calling object methods, or by calling string module functions and passing in the objects as arguments. For instance, given a variable X assigned to a string object, calling an object method:

X.method(arguments)

is usually equivalent to calling the same operation through the string module (provided that you have already imported the module):

string.method(X, arguments)

Here’s an example of the method scheme in action:

>>> S = 'a+b+c+'
>>> x = S.replace('+', 'spam')
>>> x
'aspambspamcspam'

To access the same operation through the string module in Python 2.6, you need to import the module (at least once in your process) and pass in the object:

>>> import string
>>> y = string.replace(S, '+', 'spam')
>>> y
'aspambspamcspam'

Because the module approach was the standard for so long, and because strings are such a central component of most programs, you might see both call patterns in Python 2.X code you come across.

Again, though, today you should always use method calls instead of the older module calls. There are good reasons for this, besides the fact that the module calls have gone away in Release 3.0. For one thing, the module call scheme requires you to import the string module (methods do not require imports). For another, the module makes calls a few characters longer to type (when you load the module with import, that is, not using from). And, finally, the module runs more slowly than methods (the module maps most calls back to the methods and so incurs an extra call along the way).

The original string module itself, without its string method equivalents, is retained in Python 3.0 because it contains additional tools, including predefined string constants and a template object system (a relatively obscure tool omitted here—see the Python library manual for details on template objects). Unless you really want to have to change your 2.6 code to use 3.0, though, you should consider the basic string operation calls in it to be just ghosts from the past.