Internally, computers only manipulate bits of data; every item of data input can be represented as a number encoded in base 2. However, when it comes to processing text, mathematical equations on the numeric value of letters and punctuation are not very comfortable to write and use.
To optimize the manipulation of text, many programming language provide extra facilities that help the programmer.
The two main constructs available are:
Character types are not strictly necessary – for example, Python does not have a dedicated character type, and programmers will use variables of type int to manipulate individual characters instead.
However, dedicated character types are useful because they are more compact in memory: they occupy typically much less space (1-2 bytes) than an ordinary integer (4-8 bytes). So if a program manipulates many characters it is more memory efficient to use the character type when it exists. For example, Java even has two character types, called char and byte, much smaller than int that is 32-bit long:
| Data type | Size | Set of allowable values | Adequate for |
|---|---|---|---|
| char | 16 bits | 0 to 65535 | Processing international text |
| byte | 8 bits | -128 to 127 | Processing binary files |
Which type to use depends on the application: if text is to be read in or printed for human users, usually char is adequate; whereas reading or writing character for use by another program should probably use byte instead.
Every language has a different way to manipulate sequences of zero or more characters. Some languages like C do not have a dedicated type for character strings, so a programmer has to “build their own” using arrays of individual characters. In Java, like in Python and most modern languages, there is a dedicated type; in Java, the name for this is String.
Like numbers, strings can be read in (Scanner.next()) and printed out (PrintStream.println(), .printf()) as-is. We can also express a string literal in the Java program using double quotes:
String a = "hello";
This frament creates a variable of type String and initializes it to store the sequence of characters 'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'.
Java's direct equality comparison operators “==” and “!=” are only defined for primitive types. This is why we can compare two int's using “==” (int is a primitive type), however the direct comparison operators do not work on compound types like String.
This is arguably a shortcoming of the Java language in particular: most other programming languages do allow programmers to use == to compare character strings. So unfortunately you will have to remembed this as an exception. It is especially unfortunate because Java does not inform you properly if you make the mistake to use == to compare strings. For example, with the following code:
String a = "abc";
String b = "abc";
if (a == b)
out.println("all is well");
the program will not print “all is well” as expected, because “==” silently did something else entirely.
The full explanation of what is going on here will come only later (when talking about references and aliasing), so at this point just remember this: to compare strings, use the method equals(), like this:
String a = "abc";
String b = "abc";
if (a.equals(b))
out.println("all is well");
This program fragment properly prints “all is well” as expected.
Strings are not numbers, so we cannot perform numeric arithmetic on them:
String b = "123"; String c = b / 4; // produces an error: b is not a numeric variable
The only “arithmetic” operation available with Java's String is “+”, which concatenates (attaches together) two strings:
String b = "123"; String c = b + b; out.println(c); // prints 123123
To convert a String to a number (int, double, etc.) you can use the Scanner, already seen previously. To perform the opposite conversion (from int, double, etc. to String), String provides a service called valueOf:
String d = String.valueOf(3.1415); // d = "3.1415" String e = d + d; out.println(e); // prints 3.14153.1415
The type String provides numerous services that help with the use of character strings in programs. A complete list is provided in the online documentation of the Java language, so you look up String there every time you are looking for a string-related language feature.
However it may be useful to “pre-load” the following knowledge in your long-term memory:
Also even if you do not need to remember the specifics by heart, you should remember that String provides other services that help with handling international text, in particular comparison while ignoring the difference between lower and upper case, case conversion, etc.
A literal is a construct in a programming language whose value is equal to what it represents. For example, the text “123” formed by 3 digits '1', '2', '3' concatenated together is a valid integer literal, whose value is equal to a hundred and twenty three.
In every programming language, there are some values which can be represented by multiple different literals. For example, The approximate value represented by the literal “3.1415” is also represented by “31.415e-1” (31.415 × 10 − 1 = 3.1415).
Characters in particular typically have many names in programming languages. For example, the following 3 literals all encode the same value in Java:
'a' '\x61' '\u0061' '\141'
The first form is the most simple, this this the character itself.
The other three forms are other encoding that start with a backslash (“\”) followed by a code. The presence of the backslash indicates that what follows must be interpreted differently. A construct of this form is called a character escape sequence.
The reason why these special forms with a backslash are useful is that some characters cannot be easily entered in a text editor. For example, what if I wanted to check whether a string starts with the Greek character alpha? In most environments I cannot type it in the source code because special characters are not allowed in the text editor, or not saved properly. In order to work around this shortcoming, I can use the character code instead:
final char GREEK_ALPHA = '\u0251'; if (a.charAt(0) == GREEK_ALPHA) ...
Java, like C, Python and many other programming languages recognizes the following escape sequences:
| Sequence | Meaning | Example | Same as (examples) |
|---|---|---|---|
| \uNNNN | Unicode character with code NNNN | '\u0061' | 'a' |
| \xNN | Character with hexadecimal code NN | '\x61' | 'a' |
| \NNN | Character with octal code NNN | '\141' | 'a' |
| \' | The apostrophe character | '\x27', '\047', '\u0027' | |
| \" | The double quote character | '\x22', '\042', '\u0022' | |
| \\ | The character “\” itself | '\x5c', '\134', '\u005c' | |
| \n | The newline character | '\x0a', '\012', '\u000a' | |
| \t | The tab character | '\x09', '\011', '\u0009' | |
| \r | The carriage return character | '\x0d', '\015', '\u000d' | |
| \f | The form feed (new page) character | '\x0c', '\014', '\u000c' |
To summarize, if a character can be entered as-is in the program text, use that directly; otherwise, use a character escape sequence.
Copyright © 2014, Raphael ‘kena’ Poss. Permission is granted to distribute, reuse and modify this document according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.