Until now, most examples and exercises have been using numbers. You might have been wondering by this time if programming is just for number manipulation. In daily life, it is far more commonplace to deal with textual information.

The reason that dealing with texts was postponed until this point, is that dealing with numbers is simply easier than dealing with texts. But in the present chapter, the first steps are taken to learn to manipulate textual information.

Texts, in programming languages, are dealt with in the form of strings. This chapter is on the details of strings, and on readily-available functions to juggle them.