What can you do with a string?

The full list of string methods is in Python Library Reference. Here's an idea of how you might use and combine these methods to carry out common operations.

Create a string:

Read it in using input, e.g. name = input('Enter your name: ').
Assign it a literal string value, e.g. name = "Tim Topper"

Access a character from a string:

name[0] is the first character in the string, i.e. 'T'
name[1] is the second character in the string, i.e. 'i'
name[2] is the third character in the list, i.e. 'm'

(Note that each individual character in a string is itself a string — albeit of length 1.)

Access a substring of a string (called a slice in Python):

name[1:5] is the substring of the string from position 1 up to, but not including, character 5, i.e. 'im T'

Note: that the range is [inclusive:exclusive] thus name[1:1] is '', the empty string.

Adding to a string. Because strings are immutable you cannot change the contents of one, but you can create a new one and assign it to the same name (which has the effect of replacing the old string object with a new one).

name = name + ' Smith' adds ' Smith' to the end of the string so 'Tim Topper' becomes 'Tim Topper Smith'
You can insert into a string by careful use of slices, e.g. name = name[0:4] + 'Nicholas ' + name[4:] changes 'Tim Topper' to 'Tim Nicholas Topper'.

Getting information about a string and its contents:

in can be used to test and see if a substring is contained in a longer string, e.g. if 'a' in name:
len( name ) returns the length of the string name, i.e. the number of characters in it.
name.find( 'ola' ) returns the position in which the first occurrence of 'ola' begins, or -1 if it is not found (see also rfind which searches from the back of the string towards the front).

Miscellaneous commands you should try out (because they will probably be useful on assignments!):

name.count('p')
name[2].isalpha()
':'.join(['abc','def','ghi'])
"867-395-0892".split('-')
" Tim Topper ".strip()
40*"+"