text is common form of dataand python comes with many helpful string methods to process the text stored in string values you will make use of indexingslicingand string methods in almost every python program you write the programs you are writing now don' seem too sophisticated-they don' have graphical user interfaces with images and colorful text so faryou're displaying text with print(and letting the user enter text with input(howeverthe user can quickly enter large amounts of text through the clipboard this ability provides useful avenue for writing programs that manipulate massive amounts of text these text-based programs might not have flashy windows or graphicsbut they can get lot of useful work done quickly another way to manipulate large amounts of text is reading and writing files directly off the hard drive you'll learn how to do this with python in that just about covers all the basic concepts of python programmingyou'll continue to learn new concepts throughout the rest of this bookbut you now know enough to start writing some useful programs that can automate tasks if you' like to see collection of shortsimple python programs built from the basic concepts you've learned so farcheck out github com/asweigart/pythonstdiogamestry copying the source code for each program by handand then make modifications to see how they affect the behavior of the program once you have an understanding of how the program workstry re-creating the program yourself from scratch you don' need to re-create the source code exactlyjust focus on what the program does rather than how it does it you might not think you have enough python knowledge to do things such as download web pagesupdate spreadsheetsor send text messagesbut that' where python modules come inthese moduleswritten by other programmersprovide functions that make it easy for you to do all these things so let' learn how to write real programs to do useful automated tasks practice questions what are escape characterswhat do the \ and \ escape characters representhow can you put backslash character in stringthe string value "howl' moving castleis valid string why isn' it problem that the single quote character in the word howl' isn' escapedif you don' want to put \ in your stringhow can you write string with newlines in itmanipulating strings