Comparison of programming languages (strings)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2009)

This article is part of the Programming Language Comparison series.
General Comparison
Basic Syntax
Basic Instructions
Arrays
Associative arrays
String Operations
String Functions
List comprehension
Object-oriented programming
Object-oriented constructors
Database access
Database RDBMS
Evaluation strategy
List of "hello world" programs
Comparison of ALGOL 68 and C++
Compatibility of C and C++
Comparison of Pascal and Borland Delphi
Comparison of Pascal and C
Comparison of Java and C++
Comparison of Java and C#
Comparison of C# and Visual Basic .NET
Comparison of ABAP and Java
This box: view • talk • edit

Contents 1 Concatenation 1.1 Common variants 1.2 Unique variants 2 String literals 2.1 Quoted raw 2.2 Quoted interpolated 2.3 Escaped quotes 2.4 Dual quoting 2.5 Multiple quoting 2.6 Here document 2.7 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

Operator	Languages
+	BASIC, C++, C#, Pascal, Delphi, Eiffel, JavaScript, Java, Python, Turing, Ruby, Windows PowerShell, Objective-C
++	Haskell
$+	mIRC Scripting Language
&	Ada, AppleScript, Curl, VHDL, Visual Basic, Excel
.	Perl (before version 6), PHP, and Maple (up to version 5), Autohotkey
~	Perl 6 and D
||	Icon, Standard SQL, PL/I, Rexx, and Maple (from version 6)
<>	Mathematica
..	Lua
,	J programming language, Smalltalk
^	OCaml, 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

Syntax	Language(s)
@"Hello, world!"	C#
r"Hello, world!"	Python
'Hello, world!'	PHP, Perl, Windows PowerShell
<![CDATA[Hello, world!]]>	XML (CDATA section)

[edit] Quoted interpolated

Syntax	Language(s)
"Hello, $name!"	PHP, Perl, Windows PowerShell
"Hello, #{name}!"	Ruby

[edit] Escaped quotes

Syntax	Language(s)
"I said \"Hello, world!\""	C, C++, C#, Java
"I said `"Hello, world!`""	Windows Powershell
"I said ^"Hello, world!^""	REBOL
"I said, %"Hello, World!%""	Eiffel

[edit] Dual quoting

Syntax	Language(s)
"I said ""Hello, world!"""	Visual Basic, Excel

This section requires expansion.

[edit] Multiple quoting

Syntax	Language(s)
qq(I said "Hello, world!")	Perl
%Q(I said "Hello, world!")  %(I said "Hello, world!")	Ruby
{I said "Hello, world!"}	REBOL

[edit] Here document

Syntax	Language(s)
<<EOF I have a lot of things to say and so little time to say them EOF	Perl, PHP, Ruby
@" I have a lot of things to say and so little time to say them "@	Windows Powershell
"[ I have a lot of things to say and so little time to say them ]"	Eiffel

[edit] Unique quoting variants

Syntax	Variant name	Language(s)
"""Hello, world!"""	Triple quoting	Python
13HHello, world!	Hollerith notation	FORTRAN
(indented with whitespace)	Indented with whitespace and newlines	YAML