what's the difference between string method and str method in Python?

Question

String is a module and str is a type. I found str have methods, and some of str's methods are the same with string.

>>>dir(str)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__',
'__format__', '__ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', 
'__getslice__', '__gt__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__',
'__mod__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__',
'__repr__', '__rmod__', '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__sizeof__', '__str__',
'__subclasshook__', '_formatter_field_name_split', '_formatter_parser', 
'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs',
'find', 'format', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdigit', 'islower', 'isspace',
'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lstrip', 'partition', 'replace',
'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rpartition', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 
'splitlines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper',
'zfill']

>>> dir(string)
['Formatter', 'Template', '_TemplateMetaclass', '__builtins__', '__doc__',
'__file__', '__name__', '__package__', '_float', '_idmap', '_idmapL', '_int', 
'_long', '_multimap', '_re', 'ascii_letters', 'ascii_lowercase', 'ascii_uppercase', 
'atof', 'atof_error', 'atoi', 'atoi_error', 'atol', 'atol_error', 'capitalize',   
'capwords', 'center', 'count', 'digits', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'hexdigits', 'index', 
'index_error', 'join', 'joinfields', 'letters', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lowercase',
'lstrip', 'maketrans', 'octdigits', 'printable', 'punctuation', 'replace', 'rfind',
'rindex', 'rjust', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'splitfields', 'strip', 'swapcase', 
'translate', 'upper', 'uppercase', 'whitespace', 'zfill']

What's the difference between the two sets of methods? Can a str or string use each other's method?

Answer 1

string is a deprecated module now. You should use str object always.

>>> help(str)
Help on class str in module __builtin__:

class str(basestring)
 |  str(object) -> string
 |  
 |  Return a nice string representation of the object.
 |  If the argument is a string, the return value is the same object.
.
.
>>>help(string)
Help on module string:

NAME
    string - A collection of string operations (most are no longer used).

FILE
    /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/string.py

MODULE DOCS
    http://docs.python.org/library/string

DESCRIPTION
    Warning: most of the code you see here isn't normally used nowadays.
    Beginning with Python 1.6, many of these functions are implemented as
    methods on the standard string object. They used to be implemented by
    a built-in module called strop, but strop is now obsolete itself.

Answer 2

When str methods were added to Python, much of the existing string module was rewritten as thin wrapper functions around the str methods. For example, here is the source code for the lower function in the string module:

# convert UPPER CASE letters to lower case
def lower(s):
    """lower(s) -> string

    Return a copy of the string s converted to lowercase.

    """
    return s.lower()