W1116 String Functions

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 This article can be improved by:  I think Swift is an established language now. Please review the statements below stating that it's a "new" language and, in the second paragraph, that it's not fully released. Revise to be more timeless. Maybe something like: ...language features can change in new releases, so the examples might become inaccurate.?

Swift is a new programming language developed by Apple for use with iOS and OS X development. One of the things that makes Swift so unique is its focus on safety. Because of this, it doesn't have as many functions as Objective-C, but those that it does have are more powerful. This article highlights some of those string functions from Apple's API documentation for String.

You must remember, however, that the language itself is not fully released and so this article, and the corresponding code examples may change in future releases of Swift.

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You can concatenate strings in Swift by using the addition operator (+). In its most basic form, you can simply add two strings together to make one string:

 let myString = "I am" + " awesome." //myString is equal to "I am awesome."

This is nice and simple, but it's not extremely useful. What if you want to take a string and add some numbers? Or what if you have multiple parts to your string that you want to concatenate? For these cases, Swift provides an alternative called the concatenation operator (&+). This works much like the addition operator except instead of appending the second operand (the number corresponding to String) to the end of the first operand (the string), it creates a new string out of the two.

There is no limit to how many strings you can concatenate in this way, so it only makes sense that there are functions that are similar to the addition (+) and concatenation (&+) operators, called string-append and string-insert. These work on any number of strings at once, appending them together element by element.

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let firstString = "Hello," let secondString = "World!" let thirdString = firstString + secondString print(thirdString)

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String Comparisons

Swift also provides functions for determining the equality between two strings, checking if one string is greater than another and checking if one exists in another. These are useful when you want to make sure that user input matches up with what your application expects.

String comparisons in Swift are made with the case-sensitive equal to operator (==), the not equal to operator (!=), and using ranges with the contains property.

Here are some examples of what these operators do:

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import Foundation let myString = "I am" myString == "I am" //true, both strings are equal myString != "I am" //false, myString and "I am" are not equal myString == "am" //true, both strings begin with the same letter myString.contains("am") //true, because both strings contain the letter 'a'

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Accessing Characters by Index

You can access individual characters in a String using the index of the character, with indexes starting from 0. We do this by using a method called charAt(index:)

This method returns a single Character object. So bear that in mind if you need to do any sort of comparisons on it, it won't be a simple Boolean value. An example of this is as follows:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello!" myString.charAt(0) //Character("H")

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Accessing String Length

You can get the length of a String by using its length property. This is simply an integer, not an actual character count (it includes all spaces and punctuation too). Here's an example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello!" myString.length //5

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Remember that when you do this, it includes all punctuation and extra white space.

Finding the Position of Substring within a String

You can use the index of a string to search for the position of another string inside it. Do this by using the range(of:) method, which returns an optional integer. If it returns nil, it means that the substring was not found.

This method can be very useful when you want to find out where a string occurs in another string. It also lets you know if it was not found in the string, which can be important.

Appending Strings Together

Swift provides three methods for appending strings together: append(string), appendContentsOf(_:) and join()

The first method, append(string), simply adds another String to the end of the receiver String. Like with concatenation, this method takes one string as an argument.

Here's how it is used:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello" myString.append(" World!") //now myString is "Hello World!"

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The second two methods are similar to the first, taking a function with a String type as its sole argument.

The difference is that the first argument to these functions is another String, which is added to the receiver string. For example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello" myString.appendContentsOf(" World!") //now myString is "Hello World!"

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Although this might seem like an unnecessary repetition of effort, it can make your code easier to read by not having to reference your constant string variable constantly.

Inserting Strings into Other Strings

You can insert a String into another String using the (insert:) method. This inserts the string to be placed anywhere in the receiver string and inserts nothing if the insertion point is outside of its limits.

Here's an example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello" myString.insert(" World!", atIndex:3) //now myString is "Hello World!"

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Note that this doesn't have any effect on the length of the string—it does not grow to accommodate itself. It also takes an optional argument atIndex:, which specifies where in the receiver String it should be inserted. If you omit the argument, it finds its own insertion point by looking at the beginning or end of the string.

Replacing Substrings in Strings

You can replace all occurrences of a substring inside a string with another String using the (replacingOccurrencesOf:) method. This method is very useful when you need to make multiple changes in one go. Here's an example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello there!" myString.replacingOccurrences(of: "there", with:" here") //Now myString is "Hello here!"

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This method replaces all occurrences of the string in the argument with another string in its receiver. This is very useful if you want to replace certain terms (or even misspellings) in your code, but only one at a time.

Removing Substrings from Strings

You can remove a substring from a string by using the (removingSubrangeOfString:) method. This takes a String as an argument and then deletes that string from the receiver string, wherever it appears. For example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello there!" myString.removingSubrangeOfString(" there") //Now myString is "Hello"

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With this method, unlike the (replacingOccurrencesOf:) method, you must specify where in the string it should be removed. Also note that if you remove a substring that doesn't exist in the string, this method does nothing.

You can remove an entire String from a string using the (removingRangeOfString:) method. This also takes a String as its argument, but then it deletes that string from the receiver string wherever it appears, and then returns a new string with the deleted contents.

Changing Cases

You can change the case of a string by using its (lowercaseString) or (uppercaseString)properties. These return another String, with the receiver's contents in lowercase or uppercase, respectively.

For example:

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import Foundation let myString = "Hello world!" myString.uppercaseString //Now myString is "HELLO WORLD!" let myString ="Hello world!" let myLowerCaseString = myString.lowercaseString //Now myLowerCaseString is "hello world!"

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These two properties can be useful for things like converting user input or capitalizing words in a sentence. They do not modify the original string; instead, they return a new one.

Conclusion

String functions in Swift are very useful and can help you get a lot of work done with little effort. It's good to become familiar with all of these methods, especially the ones that remove portions of strings. This way, you can quickly get the contents you want without needing to create a whole new string. String functions are also useful if you need to change certain words in your code depending on context—for example, turning "item" into "items."

The thing to take away is that Swift is a very versatile language. Most of the functions that are available in Objective-C are also available here, just with different syntax and functionality. String functions are one example of this, but there are many others as well.