Do I need to make copy of Python String?

Question

For the mutation method, dnaString is passed in as a parameter. Do we need to make a copy of this variable before altering it in python, or does it not matter?

Answer 1

Python strings are immutable, just like in Java. Thus, you don't need to make a copy... but also, it means you can't mutate a string by changing individual letters. Instead, you must return a new string that is a mutated version of the original.

Answer 2

Yes, you should make a copy of the param string. For me, I use this line to split DNA into a list of rules to make mutating the DNA easier.

actions = dnaString[:-1].split('_')

Note that [:-1] makes a copy of the string up to the length - 2 index.

I'm doing this because all state machines have a trailing '_' and splitting that would result in a trailing empty string in my list.

If you don't want to remove that trailing '_', you can do dnaString[:] to make a copy of the string.