String values consist of a single character or collection of single characters. The length of the string is variable and can
be a chain of zero or more characters (letters, digits, and punctuation marks) strung together. You use the string data type
to represent text. String literals can be included in your scripts by enclosing them in matching pairs of single or double
quotation marks. The following are examples of strings:
"Jerry saw the penguin and froze."
'"Where did you come from?" asked the king.'
"128"
'z'
A string that contains zero characters ("") is an empty (zero-length) string. The BSTR (Basic or Binary String) data type
is a pointer to a wide character string used in Automation manipulation.
Note
Because of Unicode support each BSTR character is normally expressed as two bytes rather than a single byte.
Language
|
Comments
|
VBScript
|
The VBScript String type contains a variable-length string that can be up to approximately 2 billion characters in length.
In addition to the String type, VBScript also supports the Byte type, which represents a single character (like C++'s char).
|
JScript
|
JScript uses a String object, which implements several methods and properties that allow you to manipulate and format text
strings or locate substrings within strings. There is no type to represent a single character (such as C++'s char or VBScript's
Byte); to represent a single character in JScript, you can create a string that consists of only one character.
|
PerlScript
|
PerlScript does not have a specific type that represents strings. Use the Scalar type.
|
Python
|
Python does not have a type to represent a single character (such as C++'s char). To represent a single character in Python,
you create a string that consists of only one character.
|
C++
|
The C++ API implements strings as a XSI::CString, with functions and operators for creating, concatenating, and comparing
wide character strings together.
|
C#
|
The C# string type (System.String) represents a string of Unicode characters.
|
Note
See Comparing Data Types across Languages for a table that compares the string data type across several different languages.
For high-level information about how these languages approach data type in general, see one of the following topics: