Comparison of programming languages (strings)

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This article is part of the Programming Language Comparison series.

General Comparison

Basic Syntax

String Operations

String Functions

Evaluation strategy

List of "hello world" programs

Compatibility of C and C++

Comparison of C and Pascal

Comparison of C++ and Java

Comparison of C# and Java

Comparison of C# and Visual Basic .NET

Contents 1 Concatenation 1.1 Common variants 1.2 Unique variants 2 String literals 2.1 Quoted raw 2.2 Quoted interpolated 2.3 Dual quoting 2.4 Multiple quoting 2.5 Unique quoting variants

[edit] Concatenation

Different languages use different symbols for the concatenation operator. Most languages use the "+" symbol, though several deviate from this norm.

[edit] Common variants

   +       ;; BASIC, C++, Pascal, Delphi, Javascript, Java, Python, Turing programming language, Ruby
   ++      ;; Haskell
   &       ;; Ada, AppleScript, VHDL, Visual Basic,  Excel
   .       ;; Perl (before version 6), PHP, and Maple (up to version 5)
   ~       ;; Perl 6 and D 
   ||      ;; Icon, Standard SQL, PL/I, Rexx, and Maple (from version 6)
   <>      ;; Mathematica 
   ..      ;; Lua
   ,       ;; J programming language
   ^       ;; OCaml and Standard ML
   //      ;; Fortran

[edit] Unique variants

• Awk uses the empty string: two expressions adjacent to each other are concatenated. This is called Juxtaposition. Unix shells have a similar syntax. Rexx uses this syntax for concatenation including an intervening space.
• C allows juxtaposition for string literals, however, for strings stored as character arrays, the strcat function must be used.
• MATLAB and Octave use the syntax "[x y]" to concatenate x and y.
• Visual Basic Versions 1 to 6 can also use the "+" sign but, this leads to ambiguity if a string representing a number and a number is added together.
• Microsoft Excel allows both "&" and the function "=CONCATENATE(X,Y)".

[edit] String literals

This section compares styles for declaring a string literal.

[edit] Quoted raw

   
    <![CDATA[ TheQuickBrownFox ]]> ;; CDATA section ;; XML
    

[edit] Quoted interpolated

[edit] Dual quoting

[edit] Multiple quoting

[edit] Unique quoting variants

   16HTheQuickBrownFox          ;; Hollerith notation                    ;; FORTRAN
   (indented with whitespace)   ;; Indented with whitespace and newlines ;; YAML