How to take the first three letters of a word in Python?

Question

I am new to python and a part of this course says this:

The following line of code will print the first character in each of the firstname and surname variables. Python starts counting at 0, so "Tom" would be T=0, o=1 and m=2.
print("Your initials are:",firstname[0],surname[0])

The question I am taking is where you have to take three letters from the start of a variable using this method, I am stuck so far, can anyone correct me.

surname = input () #input :smith
print (surname[0][1][2])

I'd suggest you to google any basic python string/list tutorial or documentation. — Teemu Risikko, Feb 23 '17 at 11:30
How do you suppose it should work? You have "Smith" in `surname`, so `surname[0]` is "S"; now you are trying to do `surname[0][1][2]`, which is `"S"[1][2]` -- what is it supposed to do? — avysk, Feb 23 '17 at 11:31
Possible duplicate of [Output first 100 characters in a string](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3486384/output-first-100-characters-in-a-string) — Teemu Risikko, Feb 23 '17 at 11:32

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 23 '17 at 11:35

You can't just put the indices [0][1][2] right after each other - that does something completely different (and requires multidimensional arrays). What you need to do it something like:

print(surname[0:3])

This will print out 3 characters from surname starting at 0 (that is to say the first 3 characters)

How to take the first three letters of a word in Python?

1 Answers1