String (computer science): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:37, 3 August 2001

Revision as of 15:49, 3 August 2001

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A string has special connotations in the world of [[computing]]. is Aan genericimportant name for a [[datatype]] commonly found in many [[programming language|programming languages]] to represent text. The exact semantics of the datatype vary from language to language but it usually has the core semantics of represented a finite ordered sequence of [[character]]s (a group a characters "strung" together, hence the name). It may also refer to strings of other datatypes other than characters (such as strings of numbers or vectors).

In the [[theory of computation]] strings are also often called words, and the letters are elements from an arbitrary finite set.

=== Representations ==

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The above example is how "FRANK" would look in a 10 byte NUL terminated string. Characters after the 0 do not form part of the representation.

Of course, other representations are possible. Using [[tree]]s and [[list]]s would make it easier to insert characters in the middle of the string.

=== String Processing ===

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* [[sed]]

Many [[UNIX]] utilities perform simple string manipulations and can be used to easily program some powerful string processing algorithms. Files and finite streams may be viewed as strings.

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