String Literals

• "literal" means "exactly as it's written"
• a string literal is a string whose characters are spelled out explicitly in your code
• JavaScript string literals are surrounded with either single quotes (') or double quotes (")
  • but not both!

"My dog has fleas."
'Vermonters have a hundred words for "snow".'

String Escapes

• some characters can't be typed literally, so you need to use string escapes
• backslash (\) is the escape character in JavaScript strings
• backslash means "the next character means something special"
  • for instance backslash-n (\n) means "newline"

console.log("Roses are red,\nViolets are blue;\nCandy is sweet,\nAnd so are you.")

String Messages

A string understands lots of messages. Here are a few:

"drive" + "way"
'Java' + "Script"

"Bert's pal Ernie" + ' sings "Rubber Duckie"'

"titanic".toUpperCase()
"QUIETLY".toLowerCase()

"Java".repeat(10)

"banana".length

"berry".charAt(1)
"berry".charAt(0)
"apple"[3]

"banana".includes("nan")
"banana".endsWith("ana")

"blueberry".replace("blue", "black")

Try all of these out in node or the browser console!

Check out MDN String docs for more.

Slicing and Dicing

Every string is made of lots of other strings.

You can pull out parts of a string with the slice message.

// this means "slice from character 0 to character 4"
"blueberry".slice(0, 4) 

// this means "slice from character 4 to the end
"blueberry".slice(4)

These start and end numbers are called indexes (or indices if you're feeling fancy).

MDN: slice

String Indexing Explained

Humans like to start counting at 1, but computers like to start counting at 0.

This can be confusing, so here's a visualization to help explain it.

Think of the indexes as pointing at the spaces between characters, as in this diagram:

| B | L | U | E | B | E | R | R | Y |
0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9

So with this picture in your mind, slice...

• includes the character to the right of the start index
• includes the character to the left of the end index...
• ...but excludes the character to the right of the end index

Try various start and end values in the console and see what happens!

Characters

Q: A string is "a series of characters"... but what is a character?

A: a character is a number (or character code) that stands for a symbol.

(Some characters stand for unprintable symbols like newline or tab or bell.)

ASCII and ye shall receive-ski

• ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange
• Invented in 1963

(image from Wikimedia Commons)

Unicode

• ASCII only goes from 0 to 127
• Unicode is the same as ASCII for values from 0 and 127
  • but Unicode goes a lot higher
• Currently more than 130,000 characters, including symbols for
  • 139 modern and historic scripts
  • accents and other diacritics
  • various mathematical ∞, currency £, and cultural ☮ symbols
  • emoji 😂

Unicode Strings

JavaScript strings are Unicode

That means you can use emoji in your JavaScript programs!

Like this:

"😂".repeat(20)

• sadly, this doesn't work in Windows PowerShell
• more details at our unicode lesson

Comparing Strings

JavaScript strings respond to the < and > operators.

> "apple" > "cherry"
false
> "banana" < "cherry"
true

Strings are compared one character at a time using the Unicode values of each character.

Comparing Strings: Example

So if you say "apple" < "apricot", JavaScript does something like this behind the scenes:

> "apple".charCodeAt(0)
97
> "apricot".charCodeAt(0)
97

> "apple".charCodeAt(1)
112
> "apricot".charCodeAt(1)
112

> "apple".charCodeAt(2)
112
> "apricot".charCodeAt(2)
114

In the above, 112 is less than 114, so the comparison stops there and returns true.

String Comparison Gotcha

In ASCII and Unicode, all the uppercase letters are together (codes 65 to 90), then all lowercase letters (codes 97 to 122).

That means that all uppercase strings are less than all lowercase strings.

> "apple" < "banana"
true
> "apple" < "BANANA"
false

The standard left-to-right code-to-code comparison algorithm is simplistic but very fast.

It works fine for many applications, but if you're dealing with user input or multiple languages...

Smart String Comparison

...use localeCompare instead, which understands case and diacriticals and dialects.

> "banana".localeCompare("CHERRY")
-1

Here -1 means "the left side is less than the right side". Try other comparisons and see what you get!

LAB: Strings: Exercises

• FreeCodeCamp

  • start with the challenge Declare String Variables
  • continue through the challenge Word Blanks

• Exercism:

  • Sign up on exercism.io (using your GitHub id)
  • Join the JavaScript Track
  • Follow the "Get started" instructions behind the "Begin walk-through" button on the right-hand side
  • Do the following exercises:
  • Reverse String -- this is possible to do using only built-in String methods ...but if you can't figure it out, don't worry too much; we'll come back to it when we learn about loops

 Previous Lesson Next Lesson 

Outline