3.4 Strings (Unicode)

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▼ | 3 | Built-In Datatypes

3.1 | Booleans
3.2 | Numbers
3.3 | Characters
3.4 | Strings (Unicode)
3.5 | Bytes and Byte Strings
3.6 | Symbols
3.7 | Keywords
3.8 | Pairs and Lists
3.9 | Vectors
3.10 | Hash Tables
3.11 | Boxes
3.12 | Void and Undefined

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#### 3.4`` Strings (Unicode)

A string is a fixed-length array of characters. It prints using doublequotes, where doublequote and backslash characters within the string are escaped with backslashes. Other common string escapes are supported, including \n for a linefeed, \r for a carriage return, octal escapes using \ followed by up to three octal digits, and hexadecimal escapes with \u (up to four digits). Unprintable characters in a string are normally shown with \u when the string is printed.

> > > Reading Strings in The Racket Reference documents the fine points of the syntax of strings.

The display procedure directly writes the characters of a string to the current output port (see Input and Output), in contrast to the string-constant syntax used to print a string result.

Examples:
> > "Apple"
> "Apple"
> > "\u03BB"
> "λ"
> > (display "Apple")
> Apple
> > (display "a \"quoted\" thing")
> a "quoted" thing
> > (display "two\nlines")
> two
> lines
> > (display "\u03BB")
> λ

A string can be mutable or immutable; strings written directly as expressions are immutable, but most other strings are mutable. The make-string procedure creates a mutable string given a length and optional fill character. The string-ref procedure accesses a character from a string (with 0-based indexing); the string-set! procedure changes a character in a mutable string.

Examples:
> > (string-ref "Apple" 0)
> #\A
> > (define s (make-string 5 #\.))
> > s
> "....."
> > (string-set! s 2 #\λ)
> > s
> "..λ.."

String ordering and case operations are generally locale-independent; that is, they work the same for all users. A few locale-dependent operations are provided that allow the way that strings are case-folded and sorted to depend on the end-user’s locale. If you’re sorting strings, for example, use string<? or string-ci<? if the sort result should be consistent across machines and users, but use string-locale<? or string-locale-ci<? if the sort is purely to order strings for an end user.

Examples:
> > (string<? "apple" "Banana")
> #f
> > (string-ci<? "apple" "Banana")
> #t
> > (string-upcase "Straße")
> "STRASSE"
> > (parameterize ([current-locale "C"])
> (string-locale-upcase "Straße"))
> "STRAßE"

For working with plain ASCII, working with raw bytes, or encoding/decoding Unicode strings as bytes, use byte strings.

> > > Strings in The Racket Reference provides more on strings and string procedures.

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