String

• A string is an sequence of zero or more Unicode characters.
• A string may include Unicode noncharacters, such as 0xFFFE and 0xFFFF.
• The string basic type is inherently immutable.
• A character is represented by a string of length 1.
• There is a built-in subtype string:Char for single character strings.
• The [i] expression on a string value points to the character at index i. The index positions on the string type starting with zero.
• Supported operators
  • Equality Check - == operator : checks for the same characters.
  • Comparison operators - < , <=, =>, > : compalre code points.
  • Concatenation - + operator

NOTE:

• Unicode is an encoding for textual characters which is able to represent characters from many different languages.
• Each character is represented by a unicode code point.
• A code point is an integer value that uniquely identifies the given character.
• Unicode characters can be encoded using different encodings, like UTF-8 or UTF-16.
• These encodings specify how each character's Unicode code point is encoded, as one or more bytes.

Sample

import ballerina/io;

public function main() {
    //Enclosed within double quotes
    string s = "Hello World";
    io:println(s);

    //Index based access
    io:println(s[4]);

    // Unicode code point using one or more hex digits `\u{H}`.
    string symbol = "\u{1F483}";
    io:println(symbol);

    string:Char c = "!";
    io:println(c);
    
    string greeting = s + c;
    io:println(greeting);
}

Output

Hello World
o
💃
!
Hello World!