Summary
We've covered string manipulation, regular expressions, and object serialization in this chapter. Hardcoded strings and program variables can be combined into outputtable strings using the powerful string formatting system. It is important to distinguish between binary and textual data, and bytes and str have specific purposes that must be understood. Both are immutable, but the bytearray type can be used when manipulating bytes.
Regular expressions are a complex topic, and we only scratched the surface. There are many ways to serialize Python data; pickles and JSON are two of the most popular.
In the next chapter, we'll look at a design pattern that is so fundamental to Python programming that it has been given special syntax support: the iterator pattern.
