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A string in Emacs Lisp is an array that contains an ordered sequence of characters. Strings are used as names of symbols, buffers, and files; to send messages to users; to hold text being copied between buffers; and for many other purposes. Because strings are so important, Emacs Lisp has many functions expressly for manipulating them. Emacs Lisp programs use strings more often than individual characters.
See section Putting Keyboard Events in Strings, for special considerations for strings of keyboard character events.
4.1 String and Character Basics | Basic properties of strings and characters. | |
4.2 The Predicates for Strings | Testing whether an object is a string or char. | |
4.3 Creating Strings | Functions to allocate new strings. | |
4.4 Modifying Strings | Altering the contents of an existing string. | |
4.5 Comparison of Characters and Strings | Comparing characters or strings. | |
4.6 Conversion of Characters and Strings | Converting to and from characters and strings. | |
4.7 Formatting Strings | format : Emacs’s analogue of printf .
| |
4.8 Case Conversion in Lisp | Case conversion functions. | |
4.9 The Case Table | Customizing case conversion. |
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Characters are represented in Emacs Lisp as integers; whether an integer is a character or not is determined only by how it is used. Thus, strings really contain integers.
The length of a string (like any array) is fixed, and cannot be altered once the string exists. Strings in Lisp are not terminated by a distinguished character code. (By contrast, strings in C are terminated by a character with ASCII code 0.)
Since strings are arrays, and therefore sequences as well, you can
operate on them with the general array and sequence functions.
(See section Sequences, Arrays, and Vectors.) For example, you can access or
change individual characters in a string using the functions aref
and aset
(see section Functions that Operate on Arrays).
There are two text representations for non-ASCII characters in Emacs strings (and in buffers): unibyte and multibyte (see section Text Representations). An ASCII character always occupies one byte in a string; in fact, when a string is all ASCII, there is no real difference between the unibyte and multibyte representations. For most Lisp programming, you don’t need to be concerned with these two representations.
Sometimes key sequences are represented as strings. When a string is a key sequence, string elements in the range 128 to 255 represent meta characters (which are large integers) rather than character codes in the range 128 to 255.
Strings cannot hold characters that have the hyper, super or alt modifiers; they can hold ASCII control characters, but no other control characters. They do not distinguish case in ASCII control characters. If you want to store such characters in a sequence, such as a key sequence, you must use a vector instead of a string. See section Character Type, for more information about the representation of meta and other modifiers for keyboard input characters.
Strings are useful for holding regular expressions. You can also
match regular expressions against strings (see section Regular Expression Searching). The
functions match-string
(see section Simple Match Data Access) and
replace-match
(see section Replacing the Text that Matched) are useful for
decomposing and modifying strings based on regular expression matching.
Like a buffer, a string can contain text properties for the characters in it, as well as the characters themselves. See section Text Properties. All the Lisp primitives that copy text from strings to buffers or other strings also copy the properties of the characters being copied.
See section Text, for information about functions that display strings or copy them into buffers. See section Character Type, and String Type, for information about the syntax of characters and strings. See section Non-ASCII Characters, for functions to convert between text representations and to encode and decode character codes.
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For more information about general sequence and array predicates, see Sequences, Arrays, and Vectors, and Arrays.
This function returns t
if object is a string, nil
otherwise.
This function returns t
if object is a string or a
character (i.e., an integer), nil
otherwise.
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The following functions create strings, either from scratch, or by putting strings together, or by taking them apart.
This function returns a string made up of count repetitions of character. If count is negative, an error is signaled.
(make-string 5 ?x) ⇒ "xxxxx" (make-string 0 ?x) ⇒ "" |
Other functions to compare with this one include char-to-string
(see section Conversion of Characters and Strings), make-vector
(see section Vectors), and
make-list
(see section Building Cons Cells and Lists).
This returns a string containing the characters characters.
(string ?a ?b ?c) ⇒ "abc" |
This function returns a new string which consists of those characters from string in the range from (and including) the character at the index start up to (but excluding) the character at the index end. The first character is at index zero.
(substring "abcdefg" 0 3) ⇒ "abc" |
Here the index for ‘a’ is 0, the index for ‘b’ is 1, and the
index for ‘c’ is 2. Thus, three letters, ‘abc’, are copied
from the string "abcdefg"
. The index 3 marks the character
position up to which the substring is copied. The character whose index
is 3 is actually the fourth character in the string.
A negative number counts from the end of the string, so that -1 signifies the index of the last character of the string. For example:
(substring "abcdefg" -3 -1) ⇒ "ef" |
In this example, the index for ‘e’ is -3, the index for ‘f’ is -2, and the index for ‘g’ is -1. Therefore, ‘e’ and ‘f’ are included, and ‘g’ is excluded.
When nil
is used as an index, it stands for the length of the
string. Thus,
(substring "abcdefg" -3 nil) ⇒ "efg" |
Omitting the argument end is equivalent to specifying nil
.
It follows that (substring string 0)
returns a copy of all
of string.
(substring "abcdefg" 0) ⇒ "abcdefg" |
But we recommend copy-sequence
for this purpose (see section Sequences).
If the characters copied from string have text properties, the properties are copied into the new string also. See section Text Properties.
substring
also accepts a vector for the first argument.
For example:
(substring [a b (c) "d"] 1 3) ⇒ [b (c)] |
A wrong-type-argument
error is signaled if either start or
end is not an integer or nil
. An args-out-of-range
error is signaled if start indicates a character following
end, or if either integer is out of range for string.
Contrast this function with buffer-substring
(see section Examining Buffer Contents), which returns a string containing a portion of the text in
the current buffer. The beginning of a string is at index 0, but the
beginning of a buffer is at index 1.
This function returns a new string consisting of the characters in the
arguments passed to it (along with their text properties, if any). The
arguments may be strings, lists of numbers, or vectors of numbers; they
are not themselves changed. If concat
receives no arguments, it
returns an empty string.
(concat "abc" "-def")
⇒ "abc-def"
(concat "abc" (list 120 121) [122])
⇒ "abcxyz"
;; |
The concat
function always constructs a new string that is
not eq
to any existing string.
In Emacs versions before 21, when an argument was an integer (not a
sequence of integers), it was converted to a string of digits making up
the decimal printed representation of the integer. This obsolete usage
no longer works. The proper way to convert an integer to its decimal
printed form is with format
(see section Formatting Strings) or
number-to-string
(see section Conversion of Characters and Strings).
For information about other concatenation functions, see the
description of mapconcat
in Mapping Functions,
vconcat
in Vectors, and append
in Building Cons Cells and Lists.
This function splits string into substrings at matches for the regular
expression separators. Each match for separators defines a
splitting point; the substrings between the splitting points are made
into a list, which is the value returned by split-string
.
If separators is nil
(or omitted),
the default is "[ \f\t\n\r\v]+"
.
For example,
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o") ⇒ ("S" "up is g" "" "d f" "" "d") (split-string "Soup is good food" "o+") ⇒ ("S" "up is g" "d f" "d") |
When there is a match adjacent to the beginning or end of the string, this does not cause a null string to appear at the beginning or end of the list:
(split-string "out to moo" "o+") ⇒ ("ut t" " m") |
Empty matches do count, when not adjacent to another match:
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o*") ⇒("S" "u" "p" " " "i" "s" " " "g" "d" " " "f" "d") (split-string "Nice doggy!" "") ⇒("N" "i" "c" "e" " " "d" "o" "g" "g" "y" "!") |
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The most basic way to alter the contents of an existing string is with
aset
(see section Functions that Operate on Arrays). (aset string
idx char)
stores char into string at index
idx. Each character occupies one or more bytes, and if char
needs a different number of bytes from the character already present at
that index, aset
signals an error.
A more powerful function is store-substring
:
This function alters part of the contents of the string string, by storing obj starting at index idx. The argument obj may be either a character or a (smaller) string.
Since it is impossible to change the length of an existing string, it is an error if obj doesn’t fit within string’s actual length, or if any new character requires a different number of bytes from the character currently present at that point in string.
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This function returns t
if the arguments represent the same
character, nil
otherwise. This function ignores differences
in case if case-fold-search
is non-nil
.
(char-equal ?x ?x) ⇒ t (let ((case-fold-search nil)) (char-equal ?x ?X)) ⇒ nil |
This function returns t
if the characters of the two strings
match exactly.
Case is always significant, regardless of case-fold-search
.
(string= "abc" "abc") ⇒ t (string= "abc" "ABC") ⇒ nil (string= "ab" "ABC") ⇒ nil |
The function string=
ignores the text properties of the two
strings. When equal
(see section Equality Predicates) compares two
strings, it uses string=
.
If the strings contain non-ASCII characters, and one is unibyte while the other is multibyte, then they cannot be equal. See section Text Representations.
string-equal
is another name for string=
.
This function compares two strings a character at a time. It
scans both the strings at the same time to find the first pair of corresponding
characters that do not match. If the lesser character of these two is
the character from string1, then string1 is less, and this
function returns t
. If the lesser character is the one from
string2, then string1 is greater, and this function returns
nil
. If the two strings match entirely, the value is nil
.
Pairs of characters are compared according to their character codes. Keep in mind that lower case letters have higher numeric values in the ASCII character set than their upper case counterparts; digits and many punctuation characters have a lower numeric value than upper case letters. An ASCII character is less than any non-ASCII character; a unibyte non-ASCII character is always less than any multibyte non-ASCII character (see section Text Representations).
(string< "abc" "abd") ⇒ t (string< "abd" "abc") ⇒ nil (string< "123" "abc") ⇒ t |
When the strings have different lengths, and they match up to the
length of string1, then the result is t
. If they match up
to the length of string2, the result is nil
. A string of
no characters is less than any other string.
(string< "" "abc") ⇒ t (string< "ab" "abc") ⇒ t (string< "abc" "") ⇒ nil (string< "abc" "ab") ⇒ nil (string< "" "") ⇒ nil |
string-lessp
is another name for string<
.
This function compares the specified part of string1 with the
specified part of string2. The specified part of string1
runs from index start1 up to index end1 (nil
means
the end of the string). The specified part of string2 runs from
index start2 up to index end2 (nil
means the end of
the string).
The strings are both converted to multibyte for the comparison
(see section Text Representations) so that a unibyte string can be equal to
a multibyte string. If ignore-case is non-nil
, then case
is ignored, so that upper case letters can be equal to lower case letters.
If the specified portions of the two strings match, the value is
t
. Otherwise, the value is an integer which indicates how many
leading characters agree, and which string is less. Its absolute value
is one plus the number of characters that agree at the beginning of the
two strings. The sign is negative if string1 (or its specified
portion) is less.
This function works like assoc
, except that key must be a
string, and comparison is done using compare-strings
, ignoring
case differences. See section Association Lists.
This function works like assoc
, except that key must be a
string, and comparison is done using compare-strings
.
Case differences are significant.
See also compare-buffer-substrings
in Comparing Text, for
a way to compare text in buffers. The function string-match
,
which matches a regular expression against a string, can be used
for a kind of string comparison; see Regular Expression Searching.
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This section describes functions for conversions between characters,
strings and integers. format
and prin1-to-string
(see section Output Functions) can also convert Lisp objects into strings.
read-from-string
(see section Input Functions) can “convert” a
string representation of a Lisp object into an object. The functions
string-make-multibyte
and string-make-unibyte
convert the
text representation of a string (see section Converting Text Representations).
See section Documentation, for functions that produce textual descriptions
of text characters and general input events
(single-key-description
and text-char-description
). These
functions are used primarily for making help messages.
This function returns a new string containing one character,
character. This function is semi-obsolete because the function
string
is more general. See section Creating Strings.
This function returns the first character in string. If the string is empty, the function returns 0. The value is also 0 when the first character of string is the null character, ASCII code 0.
(string-to-char "ABC") ⇒ 65 (string-to-char "xyz") ⇒ 120 (string-to-char "") ⇒ 0 (string-to-char "\000") ⇒ 0 |
This function may be eliminated in the future if it does not seem useful enough to retain.
This function returns a string consisting of the printed base-ten representation of number, which may be an integer or a floating point number. The returned value starts with a minus sign if the argument is negative.
(number-to-string 256) ⇒ "256" (number-to-string -23) ⇒ "-23" (number-to-string -23.5) ⇒ "-23.5" |
int-to-string
is a semi-obsolete alias for this function.
See also the function format
in Formatting Strings.
This function returns the numeric value of the characters in
string. If base is non-nil
, integers are converted
in that base. If base is nil
, then base ten is used.
Floating point conversion always uses base ten; we have not implemented
other radices for floating point numbers, because that would be much
more work and does not seem useful. If string looks like an
integer but its value is too large to fit into a Lisp integer,
string-to-number
returns a floating point result.
The parsing skips spaces and tabs at the beginning of string, then reads as much of string as it can interpret as a number. (On some systems it ignores other whitespace at the beginning, not just spaces and tabs.) If the first character after the ignored whitespace is neither a digit, nor a plus or minus sign, nor the leading dot of a floating point number, this function returns 0.
(string-to-number "256") ⇒ 256 (string-to-number "25 is a perfect square.") ⇒ 25 (string-to-number "X256") ⇒ 0 (string-to-number "-4.5") ⇒ -4.5 (string-to-number "1e5") ⇒ 100000.0 |
string-to-int
is an obsolete alias for this function.
Here are some other functions that can convert to or from a string:
concat
concat
can convert a vector or a list into a string.
See section Creating Strings.
vconcat
vconcat
can convert a string into a vector. See section Functions for Vectors.
append
append
can convert a string into a list. See section Building Cons Cells and Lists.
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Formatting means constructing a string by substitution of computed values at various places in a constant string. This constant string controls how the other values are printed, as well as where they appear; it is called a format string.
Formatting is often useful for computing messages to be displayed. In
fact, the functions message
and error
provide the same
formatting feature described here; they differ from format
only
in how they use the result of formatting.
This function returns a new string that is made by copying string and then replacing any format specification in the copy with encodings of the corresponding objects. The arguments objects are the computed values to be formatted.
The characters in string, other than the format specifications, are copied directly into the output; starting in Emacs 21, if they have text properties, these are copied into the output also.
A format specification is a sequence of characters beginning with a
‘%’. Thus, if there is a ‘%d’ in string, the
format
function replaces it with the printed representation of
one of the values to be formatted (one of the arguments objects).
For example:
(format "The value of fill-column is %d." fill-column) ⇒ "The value of fill-column is 72." |
If string contains more than one format specification, the format specifications correspond to successive values from objects. Thus, the first format specification in string uses the first such value, the second format specification uses the second such value, and so on. Any extra format specifications (those for which there are no corresponding values) cause unpredictable behavior. Any extra values to be formatted are ignored.
Certain format specifications require values of particular types. If you supply a value that doesn’t fit the requirements, an error is signaled.
Here is a table of valid format specifications:
Replace the specification with the printed representation of the object,
made without quoting (that is, using princ
, not
prin1
—see section Output Functions). Thus, strings are represented
by their contents alone, with no ‘"’ characters, and symbols appear
without ‘\’ characters.
Starting in Emacs 21, if the object is a string, its text properties are copied into the output. The text properties of the ‘%s’ itself are also copied, but those of the object take priority.
If there is no corresponding object, the empty string is used.
Replace the specification with the printed representation of the object,
made with quoting (that is, using prin1
—see section Output Functions). Thus, strings are enclosed in ‘"’ characters, and
‘\’ characters appear where necessary before special characters.
If there is no corresponding object, the empty string is used.
Replace the specification with the base-eight representation of an integer.
Replace the specification with the base-ten representation of an integer.
Replace the specification with the base-sixteen representation of an integer. ‘%x’ uses lower case and ‘%X’ uses upper case.
Replace the specification with the character which is the value given.
Replace the specification with the exponential notation for a floating point number.
Replace the specification with the decimal-point notation for a floating point number.
Replace the specification with notation for a floating point number, using either exponential notation or decimal-point notation, whichever is shorter.
Replace the specification with a single ‘%’. This format
specification is unusual in that it does not use a value. For example,
(format "%% %d" 30)
returns "% 30"
.
Any other format character results in an ‘Invalid format operation’ error.
Here are several examples:
(format "The name of this buffer is %s." (buffer-name)) ⇒ "The name of this buffer is strings.texi." (format "The buffer object prints as %s." (current-buffer)) ⇒ "The buffer object prints as strings.texi." (format "The octal value of %d is %o, and the hex value is %x." 18 18 18) ⇒ "The octal value of 18 is 22, and the hex value is 12." |
All the specification characters allow an optional numeric prefix between the ‘%’ and the character. The optional numeric prefix defines the minimum width for the object. If the printed representation of the object contains fewer characters than this, then it is padded. The padding is on the left if the prefix is positive (or starts with zero) and on the right if the prefix is negative. The padding character is normally a space, but if the numeric prefix starts with a zero, zeros are used for padding. Here are some examples of padding:
(format "%06d is padded on the left with zeros" 123) ⇒ "000123 is padded on the left with zeros" (format "%-6d is padded on the right" 123) ⇒ "123 is padded on the right" |
format
never truncates an object’s printed representation, no
matter what width you specify. Thus, you can use a numeric prefix to
specify a minimum spacing between columns with no risk of losing
information.
In the following three examples, ‘%7s’ specifies a minimum width
of 7. In the first case, the string inserted in place of ‘%7s’ has
only 3 letters, so 4 blank spaces are inserted for padding. In the
second case, the string "specification"
is 13 letters wide but is
not truncated. In the third case, the padding is on the right.
(format "The word `%7s' actually has %d letters in it." "foo" (length "foo")) ⇒ "The word ` foo' actually has 3 letters in it." (format "The word `%7s' actually has %d letters in it." "specification" (length "specification")) ⇒ "The word `specification' actually has 13 letters in it." (format "The word `%-7s' actually has %d letters in it." "foo" (length "foo")) ⇒ "The word `foo ' actually has 3 letters in it." |
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The character case functions change the case of single characters or of the contents of strings. The functions normally convert only alphabetic characters (the letters ‘A’ through ‘Z’ and ‘a’ through ‘z’, as well as non-ASCII letters); other characters are not altered. You can specify a different case conversion mapping by specifying a case table (see section The Case Table).
These functions do not modify the strings that are passed to them as arguments.
The examples below use the characters ‘X’ and ‘x’ which have ASCII codes 88 and 120 respectively.
This function converts a character or a string to lower case.
When the argument to downcase
is a string, the function creates
and returns a new string in which each letter in the argument that is
upper case is converted to lower case. When the argument to
downcase
is a character, downcase
returns the
corresponding lower case character. This value is an integer. If the
original character is lower case, or is not a letter, then the value
equals the original character.
(downcase "The cat in the hat") ⇒ "the cat in the hat" (downcase ?X) ⇒ 120 |
This function converts a character or a string to upper case.
When the argument to upcase
is a string, the function creates
and returns a new string in which each letter in the argument that is
lower case is converted to upper case.
When the argument to upcase
is a character, upcase
returns the corresponding upper case character. This value is an integer.
If the original character is upper case, or is not a letter, then the
value returned equals the original character.
(upcase "The cat in the hat") ⇒ "THE CAT IN THE HAT" (upcase ?x) ⇒ 88 |
This function capitalizes strings or characters. If string-or-char is a string, the function creates and returns a new string, whose contents are a copy of string-or-char in which each word has been capitalized. This means that the first character of each word is converted to upper case, and the rest are converted to lower case.
The definition of a word is any sequence of consecutive characters that are assigned to the word constituent syntax class in the current syntax table (see section Table of Syntax Classes).
When the argument to capitalize
is a character, capitalize
has the same result as upcase
.
(capitalize "The cat in the hat") ⇒ "The Cat In The Hat" (capitalize "THE 77TH-HATTED CAT") ⇒ "The 77th-Hatted Cat" (capitalize ?x) ⇒ 88 |
This function capitalizes the initials of the words in string, without altering any letters other than the initials. It returns a new string whose contents are a copy of string, in which each word has had its initial letter converted to upper case.
The definition of a word is any sequence of consecutive characters that are assigned to the word constituent syntax class in the current syntax table (see section Table of Syntax Classes).
(upcase-initials "The CAT in the hAt") ⇒ "The CAT In The HAt" |
See section Comparison of Characters and Strings, for functions that compare strings; some of them ignore case differences, or can optionally ignore case differences.
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