Manipulating Strings

Strings

As we learned earlier, a string is a sequence of characters, and a character does not have to be a letter—it can be punctuation marks, a space, a hyphen, or any other character we can produce using a computer. A string can also contain digits.

The first thing we must understand is that a string only containing digits won’t be the same as if it were an integer. Take a look at the following code:

Notice the quotation marks around the digits in the last number. This turns it into a string. The first one, numberA, will be of the integer type, so it can be used for counting and other mathematical operations. For the computer, the second one is just as much a number as the word “dog” is a number—not at all.

When working with strings, there are several typical things we can do with them. Let’s take a look at some frequent string operations.

String concatenation

When we take two strings and add them together to form a new string, we call it concatenation. How this is done differs a bit from language to language, but we can often use the + operator, as in the following example:

Here, we have two strings — "day" and "break". The quotation marks tell us that they’re strings. They’ll now be concatenated into a new string that is stored in the ...