The following functions create strings, either from scratch, or by
putting strings together, or by taking them apart. (For functions
that create strings based on the modified contents of other strings,
like string-replace and replace-regexp-in-string, see
Search and Replace.)
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)
⇒ ""
Normally, if character is an ASCII character, the
result is a unibyte string. But if the optional argument
multibyte is non-nil, the function will produce a
multibyte string instead. This is useful when you later need to
concatenate the result with non-ASCII strings or replace
some of its characters with non-ASCII characters.
Other functions to compare with this one include make-vector
(see Vectors) and make-list (see 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. With one argument, this function just copies string.
(substring "abcdefg" 0 3)
⇒ "abc"
In the above example, the index for ‘a’ is 0, the index for
‘b’ is 1, and the index for ‘c’ is 2. The index 3—which
is the fourth character in the string—marks the character position
up to which the substring is copied. Thus, ‘abc’ is copied from
the string "abcdefg".
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 for end, 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 Sequences).
If the characters copied from string have text properties, the properties are copied into the new string also. See 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 start is not
an integer or if end is neither an integer nor 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 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 works like substring but discards all text properties from
the value. Also, start may be omitted or nil, which is
equivalent to 0. Thus, (substring-no-properties string) returns a copy of string, with all text
properties removed.
This function returns a 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"
;; nil is an empty sequence.
(concat "abc" nil "-def")
⇒ "abc-def"
(concat "The " "quick brown " "fox.")
⇒ "The quick brown fox."
(concat)
⇒ ""
This function does not always allocate a new string. Callers are
advised not rely on the result being a new string nor on it being
eq to an existing string.
In particular, mutating the returned value may inadvertently change
another string, alter a constant string in the program, or even raise
an error. To obtain a string that you can safely mutate, use
copy-sequence on the result.
For information about other concatenation functions, see the
description of mapconcat in Mapping Functions,
vconcat in Functions for Vectors, and append in Building Cons Cells and Lists. For concatenating individual command-line arguments into a
string to be used as a shell command, see combine-and-quote-strings.
This function splits string into substrings based on the regular expression separators (see Regular Expressions). Each match for separators defines a splitting point; the substrings between splitting points are made into a list, which is returned.
If separators is nil (or omitted), the default is the
value of split-string-default-separators and the function
behaves as if omit-nulls were t.
If omit-nulls is nil (or omitted), the result contains
null strings whenever there are two consecutive matches for
separators, or a match is adjacent to the beginning or end of
string. If omit-nulls is t, these null strings are
omitted from the result.
If the optional argument trim is non-nil, it should be a
regular expression to match text to trim from the beginning and end of
each substring. If trimming makes the substring empty, it is treated
as null.
If you need to split a string into a list of individual command-line
arguments suitable for call-process or start-process,
see split-string-and-unquote.
Examples:
(split-string " two words ")
⇒ ("two" "words")
The result is not ("" "two" "words" ""), which would rarely be
useful. If you need such a result, use an explicit value for
separators:
(split-string " two words "
split-string-default-separators)
⇒ ("" "two" "words" "")
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o")
⇒ ("S" "up is g" "" "d f" "" "d")
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o" t)
⇒ ("S" "up is g" "d f" "d")
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o+")
⇒ ("S" "up is g" "d f" "d")
Empty matches do count, except that split-string will not look
for a final empty match when it already reached the end of the string
using a non-empty match or when string is empty:
(split-string "aooob" "o*")
⇒ ("" "a" "" "b" "")
(split-string "ooaboo" "o*")
⇒ ("" "" "a" "b" "")
(split-string "" "")
⇒ ("")
However, when separators can match the empty string,
omit-nulls is usually t, so that the subtleties in the
three previous examples are rarely relevant:
(split-string "Soup is good food" "o*" t)
⇒ ("S" "u" "p" " " "i" "s" " " "g" "d" " " "f" "d")
(split-string "Nice doggy!" "" t)
⇒ ("N" "i" "c" "e" " " "d" "o" "g" "g" "y" "!")
(split-string "" "" t)
⇒ nil
Somewhat odd, but predictable, behavior can occur for certain “non-greedy” values of separators that can prefer empty matches over non-empty matches. Again, such values rarely occur in practice:
(split-string "ooo" "o*" t)
⇒ nil
(split-string "ooo" "\\|o+" t)
⇒ ("o" "o" "o")
The default value of separators for split-string. Its
usual value is "[ \f\t\n\r\v]+".
Clean up the whitespace in string by collapsing stretches of whitespace to a single space character, as well as removing all whitespace from the start and the end of string.
Remove the leading text that matches regexp from string. regexp defaults to ‘[ \t\n\r]+’.
Remove the trailing text that matches regexp from string. regexp defaults to ‘[ \t\n\r]+’.
Remove the leading text that matches trim-left and trailing text that matches trim-right from string. Both regexps default to ‘[ \t\n\r]+’.
Attempt to Word-wrap string so that no lines are longer than length. Filling is done on whitespace boundaries only. If there are individual words that are longer than length, these will not be shortened.
If string is shorter than length characters, string is returned as is. Otherwise, return a substring of string consisting of the first length characters. If the optional end parameter is given, return a string of the length last characters instead.
If coding-system is non-nil, string will be encoded
before limiting, and the result will be a unibyte string that’s
shorter than length bytes. If string contains characters
that are encoded into several bytes (for instance, when using
utf-8), the resulting unibyte string is never truncated in the
middle of a character representation.
This function measures the string length in characters or bytes, and
thus is generally inappropriate if you need to shorten strings for
display purposes; use truncate-string-to-width or
window-text-pixel-size or string-glyph-split instead
(see Size of Displayed Text).
Split string into a list of strings on newline boundaries. If
the optional argument omit-nulls is non-nil, remove empty
lines from the results. If the optional argument keep-newlines
is non-nil, don’t remove the trailing newlines from the result
strings.
Pad string to be of the given length using padding
as the padding character. padding defaults to the space
character. If string is longer than length, no padding is
done. If start is nil or omitted, the padding is
appended to the characters of string, and if it’s
non-nil, the padding is prepended to string’s characters.
Remove the final newline, if any, from string.