String (computer science)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In mathematics, a string is a sequence of symbols that are chosen from a set or alphabet. In computer programming, a string is, essentially, a sequence of characters. A string is generally understood as a data type storing a sequence of data values, usually bytes, in which elements usually stand for characters according to a character encoding, which differentiates it from the more general array data type. In this context, the terms binary string and byte string are used to suggest strings in which the stored data does not represent text. A variable declared to have a string data type usually causes storage to be allocated in memory that is capable of holding some predetermined number of symbols. When a string appears literally in source code, it is known as a string literal and has a representation that denotes it as such.