Manipulating Strings
Four functions can be used to manipulate the characters of a string. They are listed in Table 17-8.
Table 17-8. Functions that manipulate strings
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Name |
Description |
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Translates a string into uppercase equivalents |
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Translates a string into lowercase equivalents |
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Replaces individual characters with other individual characters |
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Replaces characters that match a regular expression with a specified string |
Converting Between Uppercase and Lowercase
The upper-case and lower-case functions are used to convert a string to all uppercase or lowercase. For example, upper-case("Query") returns QUERY. The mappings between lowercase and uppercase characters are determined by Unicode case mappings. If a character does not have a corresponding uppercase or lowercase character, it is included in the result string unchanged. Table 17-9 shows some examples.
Table 17-9. Examples of the uppercase and lowercase functions
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Example |
Return value |
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Replacing Individual Characters in Strings
The translate function is used to replace individual characters in a string with other individual characters. It takes three arguments:
The string to be translated
The list of characters to be replaced (as a string)
The list of replacement characters (as a string)
Each character in the second argument is replaced by the character ...