Comparison of programming languages (strings)

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This article is part of the
Programming Language Comparison
series.
General Comparison
Basic Syntax
Basic Instructions
Arrays
Associative arrays
String Operations
String Functions
Object-oriented programming
Database access
Evaluation strategy
List of "hello world" programs
Comparison of ALGOL 68 and C++
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
Comparison of ABAP and Java
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Contents

[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++, C#, Pascal, Delphi, JavaScript, Java, Python,
              Turing, Ruby, Windows PowerShell
   ++      ;; Haskell
   &       ;; Ada, AppleScript, Curl, 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

@"TheQuickBrownFox"              ;; C#
r"TheQuickBrownFox"              ;; Python
'TheQuickBrownFox'               ;; Perl, Windows PowerShell
<![CDATA[ TheQuickBrownFox ]]>   ;; XML (CDATA section)

[edit] Quoted interpolated

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[edit] Dual quoting

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[edit] Multiple quoting

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[edit] Unique quoting variants

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