Strings and Serialization

Before we get involved with higher-level design patterns, let's take a deep dive into one of Python's most common objects: the string. We'll see that there is a lot more to the string than meets the eye, and also cover searching strings for patterns, and serializing data for storage or transmission.

In particular, we'll look at the following topics:

• The complexities of strings, bytes, and byte arrays
• The ins and outs of string formatting
• A few ways to serialize data
• The mysterious regular expression