Strings in C#

In this article, we will learn about Strings in C#.

A string is an object of type String whose value is text. Internally, the text is stored as a sequential read-only collection of Char objects. There is no null-terminating character at the end of a C# string; therefore a C# string can contain any number of embedded null characters (‘\0’). The Length property of a string represents the number of Char objects it contains, not the number of Unicode characters. To access the individual Unicode code points in a string, use the StringInfo object.

Declaring and Initializing Strings

In C#, string and String are equivalent. You can declare and initialize strings in various ways, as shown in the following example:

// Declare without initializing.
string message1;

// Initialize to null.
string message2 = null;

// Initialize as an empty string.
// Use the Empty constant instead of the literal "".
string message3 = System.String.Empty;


// Use System.String if you prefer.
System.String greeting = "Hello World!";

// In local variables (i.e. within a method body)
// you can use implicit typing.
var temp = "I'm still a strongly-typed System.String!";

// Use a const string to prevent 'message4' from
// being used to store another string value.
const string message4 = "You can't get rid of me!";

// Use the String constructor only when creating
// a string from a char[].
char[] letters = { 'A', 'B', 'C' };
string alphabet = new string(letters);

Immutability of Strings

String objects are immutable: they cannot be changed after they have been created. All of the String methods and C# operators that appear to modify a string actually return the results in a new string object. In the following example, when the contents of s1 and s2 are concatenated to form a single string, the two original strings are unmodified. The += operator creates a new string that contains the combined contents. That new object is assigned to the variable s1, and the original object that was assigned to s1 is released for garbage collection because no other variable holds a reference to it.

Therefore, different operations on strings such as concantention are of O(n) time complexity, where n is the length of the strings.

Important String Methods

• Compare(String, String): It is used to compares two specified String objects. It returns an integer that indicates their relative position in the sort order.
• Contains(String): It is used to return a value indicating whether a specified substring occurs within this string.
• Equals(String, String): It is used to determine that two specified String objects have the same value.
• IndexOf(String): It is used to report the zero-based index of the first occurrence of the specified string in this instance.
• Insert(Int32, String): It is used to return a new string in which a specified string is inserted at a specified index position.
• Split(Char[]): It is used to split a string into substrings that are based on the characters in an array.
• ToCharArray(): It is used to copy the characters in this instance to a Unicode character array.
• ToLower(): It is used to convert String into lowercase.
• ToUpper(): It is used to convert String into uppercase.
• Substring(Int32): It is used to retrieve a substring from this instance. The substring starts at a specified character position and continues to the end of the string.

We can use array indexing for accessing characters of a string, we do not need a separate method for it in C#.

Task

In the editor below, perform the different tasks as directed.