Learn to Use Strings in C++

In C programming language ASCII codes are used as in char arrays to store texts in ASCII mode. You can use char arrays in both C and C++, they are faster in operations and they have less memory usage. In s modern way, strings are useful for storing texts and they are defined in the string library. A string class contains a collection of characters surrounded by double quotes as we used in char arrays.

A string variable can be assigned as below,

Here is the full C++ example that shows how to print out a string to screen,

and the output will be,

 

1. Reading and Modifying Characters of a string

strings are used like char arrays, you can reach each character by using [ ] brackets and the index number. See example below

or you can use std in namespace so you don’t need to use std:: in each std commands as below,

output will be second character as below,

Note that index numbers in C and C++ starts with 0, and str[0] is ‘T’ character. We can modify character of a string as below,

String Concatenation

strings are easy to operate with them in many ways, while we use strcat(), strcpy() functions in char arrays.

strings are classes with many features, this is why they are preferred in modern C++. For example you can add another string by using its append() function.

this is same as

Length of a string

Length of string, number of characters can be obtained by using it’s length() command as below,

Size of a string

Size of string is size of string in the memory, if characters has 1 byte in compiler option this will equal to length, if characters has 2 bytes it will have double size of its length.

Note that, in C++ Builder both string and String are used in same ways. In the last C++ Builder versions Strings are UnicodeString, supports globally and operations are explained before in Unicode Strings in C++ On Windows