String

String

A string in ooc is a chain of bytes with no particular property. In most cases, you’ll want to deal with UTF-8 encoded strings.

The String type is the full-blown ooc String - it is a pascal string in the sense that the length is stored with it. It is backed by the Buffer type, which contains the actual bytes.

Buffers are mutable, whereas Strings are immutable. Therefore, to build up a long String from several elements, using Buffer is preferable.

Basic usage

The size of a String can be retrieved through the size property.

"dumb luck" size == 9 // true

Tests

startsWith? and endsWith? do exactly what they sound like. equals? tests for equality, and is aliased to the == operator and, for non-equality, the != operator:

"moonlight" startsWith?("moon") // true
"lightscape" endsWith?("scape") // true

"moon" == "moon" // true
"light" != "darkness" // true

Indexing

One can retrieve the n-th byte with the array indexing operator, [] and an integer value:

"abcdef"[2] // == 'c'

Note that the indexes are 0-based, like arrays.

To iterate through each byte of a String, a foreach can be used:

"Let's spell!" println()
for (c in "violin") {
  "%c, " printfln(c)
}

Formatting and printing

The format method can be used to format a string with various elements such as integers, floats, other strings, etc:

"%d" format(42) // == "42"
"%.2f" format(3.1567) // == "3.16"
"%s" format("Hi!") // == "Hi!"

The print method will print a string to the standard output. Since it is so convenient to print a string followed by a newline, println does exactly that. And since formatting is often used, printfln does formatting, then print the result followed by a newline.

"Hello world!\n" print()
// is equivalent to:
"Hello world!" println()
// itself equivalent to:
"Hello %s!" printfln("world")

Concatenation

One can use the append and prepend methods:

"light" prepend("moon") // == "moonlight"
"storm" append("born") // == "stormborn"

Or simply, the + operator:

"not" + "with" + "standing" // == "notwithstanding"

Finding and replacing

The indexOf method returns the index of a character or string inside a string:

"abcdef" indexOf?('c') // 2

Using replaceAll, one can replace all instances of a String with another String:

// yields "Brother | father | lover."
"Brother, father, lover." replaceAll(",", " |")

Slicing

The substring method allows one to get a slice of a String:

"observe" substring(2) // == "serve"
"laminate" substring(2, 5) // == "min"

Alternatively, the array indexing operator, [], can be used with a range literal.

"observe"[2..-1] // == "serve"
"laminate"[2..5] // == "min"

Trimming

To get rid of extra whitespace, use the trim method, or its variants, trimLeft and trimRight.

"  Hi!  " trim() // = "Hi!"
"  Hi!  " trimLeft() // = "Hi!  "
"  Hi!  " trimRight() // = "  Hi!"

They also have versions that accept which characters to trim:

"[Hola.]" trim() // = "[Hola.]"
"[Hola.]" trim("[]()") // = "Hola."

CString

While a pure ooc program will want to deal mostyl with Strings, when dealing with C functions, one will want to convert back and forth with toCString(), which gives a CString, a cover of char*.

Conversely, converting a CString to a String can be done with toString().