Why are Python strings immutable? Best practices for using them

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When you receive a string, you’ll be sure that it stays the same. Suppose that you’d construct a Foo as below with a string argument, and would then modify the string; then the Foo‘s name would suddenly change:

class Foo(object):
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name

name = "Hello"
foo = Foo(name)
name[0] = "J"

With mutable strings, you’d have to make copies all the time to prevent bad things from happening.

It also allows the convenience that a single character is no different from a string of length one, so all string operators apply to characters as well.

And lastly, if strings weren’t immutable, you couldn’t reliably use them as keys in a dict, since their hash value might suddenly change.

As for programming with immutable strings, just get used to treating them the same way you treat numbers: as values, not as objects. Changing the first letter of name would be

name = "J" + name[1:]

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