reverse string by character or word

In this article, we use Python to reverse string character by character or word-by-word.

First we look at the string character by character reversal, because the python provides a very useful sections, so lets see

Reverse characters

You can reverse the characters in a string or a list of strings. The example below shows how to do that:

>>> a = 'abc edf degd'
>>> a [:: -1]
'dged fde cba'
>>> 

You can also do this (same, but more clear):

>>> a = 'abcd abcd abcd'
>>> a [:: -1]
'dcba dcba dcba'
>>> 

This can also be applied to a list of strings:

>>> a = 'abc abc abc'
>>> a[:: -1].split()
['cba', 'cba', 'cba']
>>> 

Reverse word order

The method reverse may be used to reverse item order. In this example the string a is converted into a list of strings using the .split() method. Then the .reverse() method changes the order of the list.

>>> a = 'AAA BBB CCC'
>>> r = a.split()
>>> r
['AAA', 'BBB', 'CCC']
>>> r.reverse()
>>> r
['CCC', 'BBB', 'AAA']
>>> 

The reverse() method can be applied on any list, so you can also use it for a list of numbers:

>>> a = [ 1,2,3,4,5,6 ]
>>> a.reverse()
>>> a
[6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1]
>>>