Text is referred to as a string. This comes from the terminology of “a string of characters”.

So much of the data we deal with in programming is ultimate just a string of characters. Like the text on this page, or a list of names in a database. Email address, phone numbers, survey responses, and many more things come in the form of a string. Therefore, it is important, as a programmer, to learn how to deal with strings.

Python has a lot of built-in tools for processing and handling strings.

course = "Python Programming" # this is what a string looks like in Python

print(len(course))  # prints length of string (number of characters in string)

Whitespace characters count in terms of strings, and so the above would print out 18.