Strings
Each programming language has its own data types which are used while creating programs. Data types can include integers, strings, and boolean. You will be using each of them more frequently, and understanding each data type is so important if you really want to learn the programming language. In our case here, we focus on strings. Here we give you a general idea about strings, and we will not focus on any programming language.
What are the strings?
Strings are the data types that represent text. Text here could include text characters, spaces, numbers, and punctuation marks. An example of a string is “hello world!!!!!” Typically in programming languages, they are enclosed with question marks. It could be a single quotation mark or double quotations. But why do we have to enclose strings with quotation marks? Sometimes strings are made of numbers in order to avoid confusion. The quotation mark can make it easy to differentiate between the two. Further, variables are always named using text. This might sound ironic. But having a quotation mark differentiates a variable name and a string.
Strings are made up of characters. As a novice programmer, you might not know that these characters are just a side representation. It’s easy to believe that the computer stores the characters in its memory, but this is not the case. Computers aren’t aware of characters, the computers only store values in the form of code.
What are some of the things that you could do with strings?
There are several string manipulations that you can accomplish with every software that you use. Be it R, Python, or C++. The difference comes in the syntax involved in those programming languages.
String conversion.
This step here involves converting a string to another data variable or another data variable to a string.
Previously, we had stated that a string could contain numerals. Yes, this is perfectly true. Let’s say we could have “1234″ as a string. But we can convert it to a number. In the same manner, we can convert an integer to a string.
Concatenation
This is much like joining two strings together. Let’s say you have a string “hello” and “world” stored in two variables and you want to combine them into one. That is what string concatenation is. In most programming languages, the addition sign can be used to concatenate two string variables and store them into a new one.
Splitting
In the same way that we can join the strings into two variables, we can split them into their constituent characters or words. Let’s take the hello string we can split it into characters “h”, “e”, “l”, “l”, and “o”
Extracting part of the string.
This can be referred to as slicing. Let’s say that you have the above string “hello world!” And you want to extract the first two characters. You could also extract the last three characters. The last of the string that you have extracted could be defined as a substring. The substring could be a prefix if it occurs at the beginning of the string or a suffix if it occurs at the end of the string.
Capitalization.
This refers to changing the characters to upper case or lower case. Though not commonly used. But it is mentioned here to satisfy the goal of this article to help you know the different string manipulations.
Stripping.
This refers to the removal of white spaces in the string. In this case, the white space refers to the white space characters such as tabs or spaces. What this feature does is to remove any sequence of spaces and only leaves a single space.
Immutability
Another feature that you probably should know is whether a string is mutable or immutable. What this implies is whether the length of the character string can be changed. This will depend on the programming language that you are using. Make sure that you know this as it could sometimes lead to errors.
Homework help.
Strings are one of the basic concepts that every programmer should master. However, at times the things get complicated. This is the time when you should use a strings expert in the programming language that you are using. We are a team of proficient programmers who would be glad to provide you with strings homework help.