Char and strings

So far we have been dealing with numeric and boolean datatypes. In this section we will look at character representation and how Julia handles ASCII and UTF-8 strings of characters. We will also introduce the concept of regular expressions, widely used in pattern matching and filtering operations.

Characters

Julia has a built-in type Char to represent a character. A character occupies 32 bits not 8, so a character can represent a UTF-8 symbol and may be assigned in a number of ways:

julia> c = 'A'
julia> c = char(65)
julia> c = '\U0041'

All these represent the ASCII character capital A.

It is possible to specify a character code of '\Uffff' but char conversion does not check that every value is valid. However, Julia provides an isvalid_char() function:

julia> c = '\Udff3';
julia> is_valid_char(c; ) # => gives false.

Julia uses the special C-like syntax for certain ASCII control characters such as '\b','\t','\n','\r',\'f' for backspace, tab, newline, carriage...