From the book
From the book
From the book
STRINGS
A String is a sequence of characters (char values). A literal String is a sequence of characters within double quotes, such as "Hello, World". The data type String is a Java data type but it is not a primitive type. We consider String now because it is a fundamental data type that almost every Java program uses.
Concatenation.
Java has a built-in concatenation operator (+) for String like the built-in operators that it has for primitive types, justifying the addition of the row in the table below to the primitive-type table on page 12. The result of concatenating two String values is a single String value, the first string followed by the second.
|
type |
set of values |
typical literals |
operators |
typical expressions |
|
|
expression |
value |
||||
|
String |
character sequences |
"AB" |
+ |
"Hi, " + "Bob" |
"Hi, Bob" |
Java’s String data type
Conversion.
Two primary uses of strings are to convert values that we can enter on a keyboard into data-type values and to convert data-type values to values that we can read on a display. Java has built-in operations for String to facilitate these operations. In particular, the language includes libraries Integer and Double that contain static methods to convert between String values and int values and between String values and double values, respectively.
public class Integer |
||
static int |
parseInt(String s) |
convert s to an int value |
static String |
toString(int i) |
convert i to a String value |
|
|
||
public class Double |
||
static double |
parseDouble(String s) |
convert s to a double value |
static String |
toString(double x) |
convert x to a String value |
APIs for conversion between numbers and String values
Automatic conversion.
We rarely explicitly use the static toString() methods just described because Java has a built-in mechanism that allows us to convert from any data type value to a String value by using concatenation: if one of the arguments of + is a String, Java automatically converts the other argument to a String (if it is not already a String). Beyond usage like "The square root of 2.0 is " + Math.sqrt(2.0) this mechanism enables conversion of any data-type value to a String, by concatenating it with the empty string "".
Command-line arguments.
One important use of strings in Java programming is to enable a mechanism for passing information from the command line to the program. The mechanism is simple. When you type the java command followed by a library name followed by a sequence of strings, the Java system invokes the main() method in that library with an array of strings as argument: the strings typed after the library name. For example, the main() method in BinarySearch takes one command-line argument, so the system creates an array of size one. The program uses that value, args[0], to name the file containing the whitelist, for use as the argument to In.readInts(). Another typical paradigm that we often use in our code is when a command-line argument is intended to represent a number, so we use parseInt() to convert to an int value or parseDouble() to convert to a double value.
Computing with strings is an essential component of modern computing. For the moment, we make use of String just to convert between external representation of numbers as sequences of characters and internal representation of numeric data-type values. In Section 1.2, we will see that Java supports many, many more operations on String values that we use throughout the book; in Section 1.4, we will examine the internal representation of String values; and in Chapter 5, we consider in depth algorithms that process String data. These algorithms are among the most interesting, intricate, and impactful methods that we consider in this book.