String fundamentals in Java

What is a String?

Observe the below picture for a good 10 seconds.

What do you see?

1. Lot of characters?
2. Do you see any meaning in them? hmmm for some character yes.

Next game. Now, let’s arrange those characters in such a way that it becomes arvind. What? Yes, you get my name.

Let’s arrange in such a way that it becomes darvin, may be someone else’s name.

Anyway, thanks for playing.

WTF is your point Arvind?

My point is, when you arrange characters in certain way they become more meaninful. When you put together those characters they are also called String in some world. They does not need to be meaningful though. But let’s not fail to define formal definition of String.

Array of characters is called String.

How to create String in Java

This is how one can create String in Java.

String name = "arvind";

There is another way to create String using new keyword.

String name = new String("arvind");

Important methods and fields in String

When working with String, it’s good to know some inbuilt methods and fields that would come handy when wrting code.

1. length() returns length of the string

String name = "arvind";
System.out.println(name.length()); // Prints => 6

2. charAt(int i) return character at the index i

String name = "arvind";
System.out.println(name.charAt(0)); // Prints => a

3. concat(String s) concat the string s

String name = "arvind";
String fullName = name.concat(" pandey");
System.out.println(fullName);  // Prints => arvind pandey

4. toCharArray() convert string to character array

String name = "arvind";
char[] nameArr = name.toCharArray();  // Converts to char array

5. codePointAt(int i) the code point value of the character at the index i

String name = "arvind";
System.out.println(name.codePointAt(0));  // Prints => 97

6. contains(String s) true if this string contains s, false otherwise

String name = "arvind";
System.out.println(name.contains("a")); // Prints => true
System.out.println(name.contains("b")); // Prints => false

7. toUpperCase() the String, converted to uppercase

String name = "arvind";
System.out.println(name.toUpperCase());  // Prints => ARVIND

8. toLowerCase() the String, converted to lowercase

String name = "Arvind Pandey";
System.out.println(name.toLowerCase()); // Prints => arvind pandey

There is huge list of other important methods inside String class. I leave it to you to explore further.

Hope you liked this tutorial. You might also like other tutorials in this series here