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Strings and Characters

A string is a native and useful container of characters. It permits creating texts in Drift. Strings can be empty.

"Hello, World!"
// It is a string, where each symbol is a character: H, e, l, ...

Write a string​

String Literal​

The main way to create a string is the literal one. To create a string literal, you must surround characters by double-quotes.

let a = "Hello, World"
note

String literal can be multiline:

let a = "Hello,
World"

// Result:
// Hello,
// World

No one """ (triple quotes) syntax exists. The single double-quotes are used for multiline string literal.

Indents inside a string literal are included in the string expression.

Special Characters inside a String​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement special character expression.

Sanitized String​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement sanitized string.

Sanitized String syntax will permit creating a string including special characters without triggering their effect:

let a = @"Hello, \n World!"
// It will let \n as two characters: Hello, \n World!

Useful to avoid prefixing special expressions with backslash everytime.

String Operations​

Concatenation​

Two strings can be concatenated. It consists in merging both to return one. The + permits to do it.

let helloWorld = "Hello" + "World"
// helloWorld equals "HelloWorld"

Multiplication​

A string can be multiplied with a numeric. Useful to create repetitive texts.

let separator = "-" * 6
// separator equals "------" (6x dashes)

String Interpolation​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement string interpolation. Concatenation is the only way.

String edition​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement string edition methods.

We plan to add native support for:

  • Indexing characters inside a String
var text = "Hello"
print(text[0]) // It will display "H" Character

text[1] = "a"
print(text)    // It will display "Hallo" String
  • Negative indexing
var text = "Hello"
print(text[-1], text[-2]) // It will display "o" and "l"

text[-1] = "a"
print(text)               // It will display "Hella"
note

Negative index is computed by adding to it the string's length.

[-1] index equals to -1 + [String].length()

"Hello"
// This string's length equals 5.
// [-1] index equals to -1 + 5 = 4
  • Remove character using index
var a = "Hello"
a-[0]   // It will remove the first character, "Hello" -> "ello"
  • Add character to the provided index position
var a = "Hello"
a+[2] = "x"   // It will add "x" to the third position, "Hello" -> "Hexllo"
  • Substring using range
let a = "Hello"
print( a[ 1..3 ] )      // It will display "ell"

Characters​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement Character type. Characters are computed internally.

Unicode Characters​

warning

At this moment, Drift does not implement Unicode characters expressions.