Let's concatenate strings. a + b f"{a}{b}" "".join([a, b]) "{}{}".format(a, b) If a == b, then you can also, which itself is a bit ridiculous: a *

Let's concatenate strings. a + b f"{a}{b}" "".join([a, b]) "{}{}".format(a, b) If a == b, then you can also, which itself is a bit ridiculous: a * 2 Is mentioning StringIO considered cheating? I would feel the Zen if Python would have a separate concatenation operator, it could be even the same for strings and lists. Lack of the operator in popular languages is my pet peeve.