Object Oriented

Programming in Java

Strings

1
Motivations

Often you encounter the problems that

involve string processing and file input
and output.
Suppose you need to write a program to
replace all occurrences of a word with a
new word in a file. How do you solve this
problem?

2
 The String Class
• Constructing a String:
• String message = "Welcome to Java“;
• String message = new String("Welcome to
Java“);
• String s = new String();
• Obtaining String length and Retrieving Individual Characters
in a string
• String Concatenation (concat)
• Substrings (substring(index), substring(start, end))
• Comparisons (equals, compareTo)
• String Conversions
• Finding a Character or a Substring in a String
• Conversions between Strings and Arrays
• Converting Characters and Numeric Values to Strings
3
 Constructing Strings

String message = new String ("Welcome to Java");

Since strings are used frequently, Java provides a

shorthand initializer for creating a string:

String message = "Welcome to Java";

4
String Comparisons

5
String Comparisons
• equals

String s1 = new String("Welcome“);

String s2 = "welcome";

if (s1.equals(s2)){
System.out.println(“S1 and S2 have exact same contents”);
}

if (s1.equalsIgnoreCase(s2)) {
System.out.println(“S1 and S2 have the same contents”);
}
6
String Length, Characters, and
Combining Strings

8
Finding String Length

Finding string length using the length() method:

message = "Welcome";
message.length() (returns 7)

9
 Retrieving Individual Characters in a String

• Do not use message[0]

• Use message.charAt(index)

• Index starts from 0

Indices 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

message W e l c o m e t o J a v a

message.charAt(0) message.length() is 15 message.charAt(14)

10
Concatenation Operator

String firstName = “Amr”;

String lastName = “Al-Ibrahim”;
String fullName = lastName+” “+firstName;
 “Al-Ibrahim Amr”

• If one of the operands of the + operator is a string, the other is

automatically converted to string and the two strings are then
concatenated.
String course = “ICS”;
int code = 102;
String courseCode = course+code  “ICS102”

• We frequently use the concatenation operator in println statements.

System.out.println(“The area =“+area);
String Concatenation

String s3 = s1.concat(s2);

String s3 = s1 + s2;

12
Extracting Substrings

13
 Substrings
• Example: String greeting = “Hello, World”;
H e l l o , W o r l d !
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

• Java provides two methods for this operation:

substring(start); Returns the substring from
start to the end of the string
substring(start, Returns a substring from
end); start to end but not including
the character at end.

Examples:
String sub = greeting.substring(0, 4);  “Hell”
String w = greeting.substring(7, 12);  “World”
String tail = greeting.substring(7);  “World!”
 Extracting Substrings

You can extract a single character from a string using the

charAt method. You can also extract a substring from a
string using the substring method in the String class.

String s1 = "Welcome to Java";

String s2 = s1.substring(0, 11) + "HTML";

Indices 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

message W e l c o m e t o J a v a

message.substring(0, 11) message.substring(11)

15
 Converting, Replacing, and Splitting Strings

java.lang.String
+toLowerCase(): String Returns a new string with all characters converted to lowercase.
+toUpperCase(): String Returns a new string with all characters converted to uppercase.
+trim(): String Returns a new string with blank characters trimmed on both sides.
+replace(oldChar: char, Returns a new string that replaces all matching character in this
newChar: char): String string with the new character.
+replaceFirst(oldString: String, Returns a new string that replaces the first matching substring in
newString: String): String this string with the new substring.
+replaceAll(oldString: String, Returns a new string that replace all matching substrings in this
newString: String): String string with the new substring.
+split(delimiter: String): Returns an array of strings consisting of the substrings split by the
String[] delimiter.

16
 Examples
"Welcome".toLowerCase() returns a new string, welcome.
"Welcome".toUpperCase() returns a new string, WELCOME.
" Welcome ".trim() returns a new string, Welcome.
"Welcome".replace('e', 'A') returns a new string, WAlcomA.
"Welcome".replaceFirst("e", "AB") returns a new string,
WABlcome.
"Welcome".replace("e", "AB") returns a new string,
WABlcomAB.
"Welcome".replace("el", "AB") returns a new string,
WABlcome.

17
 Finding a Character or a Substring in a String

java.lang.String
+indexOf(ch: char): int Returns the index of the first occurrence of ch in the string.
Returns -1 if not matched.
+indexOf(ch: char, fromIndex: Returns the index of the first occurrence of ch after fromIndex in
int): int the string. Returns -1 if not matched.
+indexOf(s: String): int Returns the index of the first occurrence of string s in this string.
Returns -1 if not matched.
+indexOf(s: String, fromIndex: Returns the index of the first occurrence of string s in this string
int): int after fromIndex. Returns -1 if not matched.
+lastIndexOf(ch: int): int Returns the index of the last occurrence of ch in the string.
Returns -1 if not matched.
+lastIndexOf(ch: int, Returns the index of the last occurrence of ch before fromIndex
fromIndex: int): int in this string. Returns -1 if not matched.
+lastIndexOf(s: String): int Returns the index of the last occurrence of string s. Returns -1 if
not matched.
+lastIndexOf(s: String, Returns the index of the last occurrence of string s before
fromIndex: int): int fromIndex. Returns -1 if not matched.

22
 Finding a Character or a Substring in a
String

"Welcome to Java".indexOf('W') returns 0.

"Welcome to Java".indexOf('x') returns -1.
"Welcome to Java".indexOf('o', 5) returns 9.
"Welcome to Java".indexOf("come") returns 3.
"Welcome to Java".indexOf("Java", 5) returns 11.
"Welcome to Java".indexOf("java", 5) returns -1.
"Welcome to Java".lastIndexOf('a') returns 14.

23
Converting Strings to char

• char[] chars = "Java".toCharArray();

24
 Convert Character and Numbers to Strings

The String class provides several static valueOf methods for converting a
character, an array of characters, and numeric values to strings. These
methods have the same name valueOf with different argument types char,
char[], double, long, int, and float.
For example, to convert a double value to a string, use
String.valueOf(5.44).
The return value is string consists of characters ‘5’, ‘.’, ‘4’, and ‘4’.

25