strings

strings

Instances of the string class are immutable sequences of characters. Because string is a class, it is a reference type . Because instances are immutable, once they are constructed, their contents cannot change. Note that this does not mean that string variables cannot change - we can assign a string variable s the value “abc” and later assign it the value “xyz”. These assignments simply assign to s references to different instances of the string class. What immutability does mean is that there is no way to change any of the characters in either of these instances (i.e., in either “abc” or “xyz”). As a result, it is safe to copy a string by simply assigning the value of one string variable to another; for example, if s is a string variable, we can write:

string t = s;

Note that this is not safe when dealing with mutable reference types, such as arrays. For example, let a be an int[ ] with at least one element, and consider the following code sequence:

int[ ] b = a;
b[0]++;

Because a and b refer to the same array, a[0] is incremented as well. This danger is absent for strings because they are immutable.

We access individual characters in a string by indexing; i.e., if s is a string variable, then s[0] retrieves its first character, s[1] retrieves its second character, etc. For example, if s refers to the string, “abc”, then after executing

char c = s[1];

c will contain ‘b’. Note that a statement like

s[0] = 'x';

is prohibited in order to enforce immutability.

We obtain the number of characters in a string using its Length property; for example:

int len = s.Length;

We can concatenate two strings using the + operator. For example, if s refers to the string “abc” and t refers to the string “xyz”, then

string u = s + t;

will assign the string “abcxyz” to u.

Because strings are immutable, building long strings directly from many small pieces is very inefficient. Suppose, for example, that we want to convert all the lower-case characters in the string text to upper-case, and to convert all upper-case letters in text to lower-case. All other characters we will leave unchanged. We can do this with the following code:

string result = "";
for (int i = 0; i < text.Length; i++)
{
    char c = text[i];
    if (char.IsLower(c))
    {
        result += char.ToUpper(c);
    }
    else if (char.IsUpper(c))
    {
        result += char.ToLower(c);
    }
    else
    {
        result += c;
    }
}

Now suppose that text contains 100,000 characters. Each iteration of the loop executes one of the three branches of the if-statement, each of which concatenates one character to the string accumulated so far. Because strings are immutable, this concatenation must be done by copying all the characters in result, along with the concatenated character, to a new string. As a result, if we were to add up the total number of characters copied over the course of the entire loop, we would come up with 5,000,050,000 character copies done. This may take a while. In general, we say that this code runs in O(n²) time, where n is the length of text. This means that as n increases, the running time of the code is at worst proportional to n². In the next section , we will see how we can do this much more efficiently using another data structure.

strings have many other methods to allow various kinds of manipulation - see the documentation for the string class for details.