Kotlin Help

Strings

Strings in Kotlin are represented by the type String. Generally, a string value is a sequence of characters in double quotes ("):

val str = "abcd 123"

Elements of a string are characters that you can access via the indexing operation: s[i]. You can iterate over these characters with a for loop:

fun main() { val str = "abcd" //sampleStart for (c in str) { println(c) } //sampleEnd }

Strings are immutable. Once you initialize a string, you can't change its value or assign a new value to it. All operations that transform strings return their results in a new String object, leaving the original string unchanged:

fun main() { //sampleStart val str = "abcd" println(str.uppercase()) // Create and print a new String object println(str) // The original string remains the same //sampleEnd }

To concatenate strings, use the + operator. This also works for concatenating strings with values of other types, as long as the first element in the expression is a string:

fun main() { //sampleStart val s = "abc" + 1 println(s + "def") //sampleEnd }

String literals

Kotlin has two types of string literals:

Escaped strings

Escaped strings can contain escaped characters.
Here's an example of an escaped string:

val s = "Hello, world!\n"

Escaping is done in the conventional way, with a backslash (\).
See Characters page for the list of supported escape sequences.

Raw strings

Raw strings can contain newlines and arbitrary text. It is delimited by a triple quote ("""), contains no escaping and can contain newlines and any other characters:

val text = """ for (c in "foo") print(c) """

To remove leading whitespace from raw strings, use the trimMargin() function:

val text = """ |Tell me and I forget. |Teach me and I remember. |Involve me and I learn. |(Benjamin Franklin) """.trimMargin()

By default, a pipe symbol | is used as margin prefix, but you can choose another character and pass it as a parameter, like trimMargin(">").

String templates

String literals may contain template expressions – pieces of code that are evaluated and whose results are concatenated into the string. A template expression starts with a dollar sign ($) and consists of either a name:

fun main() { //sampleStart val i = 10 println("i = $i") // Prints "i = 10" //sampleEnd }

or an expression in curly braces:

fun main() { //sampleStart val s = "abc" println("$s.length is ${s.length}") // Prints "abc.length is 3" //sampleEnd }

You can use templates both in raw and escaped strings. To insert the dollar sign $ in a raw string (which doesn't support backslash escaping) before any symbol, which is allowed as a beginning of an identifier, use the following syntax:

val price = """ ${'$'}_9.99 """
Last modified: 09 June 2023