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

my_list = [1, 2, 3]
my_str = 'test'

my_list.append(my_str)
print("The new list is : " + str(my_list))

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.

my_list = [1, 2, 3]
my_str = 'test'

my_list += [my_str]
print("The new list is : " + str(my_list))

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.

my_list = [1, 2, 3]
my_str = 'test'

my_list += my_str
print("The new list is : " + str(my_list))

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.

my_list = []
my_str = 'test'

my_list += my_str
print("The new list is : " + str(my_list))

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.

my_list = []
my_str = 'test'

for character in my_str:
    my_list.append(character)
    print(my_list)

print("The new list is : " + str(my_list))

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']