Swift Strings

When you save a text in a constant or a variable, your are saving a string in Swift. Furthermore, you can see a string as a serie of characters. For that reason, you can access to the content of a string in various ways, such as Collection (Array i.e.) of characters.

Initialize a String #

A string literal is a text writed with a double quote at beginning and at the end. So, if you need to save a text in a constant or a variable, you only must to assign a string literal to it.

let coach = "Ted Lasso"
var team = "AFC Richmond"

NOTE: It is fundamental remember that strings are case sensitive. So, “a simple string” it is different of “A simple string”.

Concatenating strings #

If you need to save the value of two strings in another constant or variable, you can concatenate it.

It is as easy as use the operator + between the two values when you have to assign it.

let name = "Michael"
let lastName = "Scott"

let funnyBoss = name + lastName

Another way, it is to use the operator += to add text to a previous initialized string

var spy = "Bond"
spy += ", James Bond"

In the above example, the final value of spy is Bond, James Bond

And, as a String is a Collection of characters, you can also use the method .append()

var greet = "Hello, world"
greet.append("!")

In the last code, greet value is Hello, world!

String interpolation #

But maybe the most used feature in Strings could be String interpolation. It allows use constants or variables values inside a string.

In this case, you can do it, writing the constant or variable name, inside parenthesis “()”, and starting with a backlash “". That is \(variableName)

let name = "Forest"
let fullName = "Forest Gump"

let introduction = "Hello, I am \(name), \(fullName)"

The final value of introduction is "Hello, I am Forest, Forest Gump"

Multiline String #

Finishing (althought it is not used often in real world apps) maybe sometimes you need to save larger texts in a string, and it could be difficult read the value for others programmers o for yourself. In this case, you can use a multiline string.

To save a multiline string, you only need to write three quotation marks at the beginning, and finish with another three in a single line. For example:

let text = """
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep;
"""

First triple double quotes doesn’t need to be in a single line, but it helps to focus in text value.

Happy coding! 👨🏻‍💻