If you want to append a string to a list, you can do it using the append function.

The string is added to the end of the list. Now the list consists of 3 numbers and one string.

The new list is : [1, 2, 3, 'test']

The Plus (+) Operator

You can achieve a similar effect using the plus operator.

If you run the code the result is identical.

The new list is : [1, 2, 3, 'test']

my_list += [my_str] is the same as my_list = my_list + [my_str]. It’s just a shorter notation used in many programming languages, including Python.

Notice that the string is added as the whole list element, that’s why it’s in the square brackets: [my_str].

Append Individual Elements of the String

In the last part of the tutorial, we used brackets to add the string as a single element.

Let’s take a look at what happens if we remove these brackets.

Now, each character of the string is added as a single element.

The new list is : [1, 2, 3, 't', 'e', 's', 't']

Append String to Empty List

If you want to make a list consisting only of the string characters, you can do it by creating an empty list and adding each character separately.

Now, there are only string characters inside the list.

The new list is : ['t', 'e', 's', 't']

Use Loop

You can use a loop to append individual characters. For this, we are going to use the for loop and the append function.

The for loop goes through each character of the string and adds it to the end of the list.

Inside the loop, the actual value of my_list is printed each time the character is added to the end of the list and the final result is the same as before.

['t']
['t', 'e']
['t', 'e', 's']
['t', 'e', 's', 't']
The new list is : ['t', 'e', 's', 't']