The string type represents a string of Unicode characters. string is an alias for System.String in the .NET Framework.
Although string is a reference type, the equality operators (== and !=) are defined to compare the values of string objects, not references (7.9.7 String equality operators). This makes testing for string equality more intuitive.
string a = "hello"; string b = "h"; b += "ello"; // append to b Console.WriteLine( a == b ); // output: True -- same value Console.WriteLine( (object)a == b ); // False -- different objects
The + operator concatenates strings:
string a = "good " + "morning";
The [] operator accesses individual characters of a string:
char x = "test"[2]; // x = 's';
String literals are of type string and can be written in two forms, quoted and @-quoted. Quoted string literals are enclosed in double quotation marks ("):
"good morning" // a string literal
and can contain any character literal, including escape sequences:
string a = "\\\u0066\n"; // backslash, letter f, new line
Note The escape code \
udddd (where dddd is a four-digit number) represents the Unicode character U+dddd. Eight-digit Unicode escape codes are also recognized: \udddd\udddd.
@-quoted string literals start with @ and are enclosed in double quotation marks. For example:
@"good morning" // a string literal
The advantage of @-quoting is that escape sequences are not processed, which makes it easy to write, for example, a fully qualified file name:
@"c:\Docs\Source\a.txt" // rather than "c:\\Docs\\Source\\a.txt"
To include a double quotation mark in an @-quoted string, double it:
@"""Ahoy!"" cried the captain." // "Ahoy!" cried the captain.
Another use of the @ symbol is to use referenced (/reference) identifiers that happen to be C# keywords. For more information, see 2.4.2 Identifiers.
Example
// keyword_string.cs using System; class test { public static void Main( String[] args ) { string a = "\u0068ello "; string b = "world"; Console.WriteLine( a + b ); Console.WriteLine( a + b == "hello world" ); } }
Output
hello world True