Strings

What is a string

In the previous chapters we looked at numeric values and single characters (char's). Strings are used for text-values such as words or sentences.

There are two types of strings:

In traditional C, strings were basically just arrays of char-values (char, wchar_t).

In C++ however, strings are represented as objects which offer some comfortable ways to work with these type of data. C++-strings are implemented in the standard-library "std::string" which must be referenced (#include) in the program.

In this tutorial we'll focus on the latter.

Examples:

#include<iostream> 
#include<string>
using namespace std; 
int main() 
{ 
    string sometext="This is a new text"; //Declaring a string

    cout << "Initial value of sometext is: " << sometext << endl;  //Writing the initial text to the console.
    //Note: that endl isn't needed to show the value on the console, but adds a new line at the end

    getline(cin, sometext);  //Reading textinput from the keyboard

    cout << "You entered: " << sometext << endl;  //Writing the given text back to the console.

    return 0;
}

Exercise

Change the program in the bottom in a way so that it declares and initialises a string variable and outputs the Text "I just learned something about strings" (without the quotation marks) followed by a carriage return and linefeed to the console.