Strings#

A string is a data type that can store any text you might want. We have already seen strings before, for example "Hello World", and we have stored strings as variables before, for instance when we stored the string "This is also a variable" in the variable message:

message = "This is also a variable";

The ability to store and manipulate strings is a key part of ImageJ Macro programming, so let's take a close look.

We can create a string in the same way we create any other variable, by picking a name and assigning a value to it. In the case of strings, the value must be enclosed in quotation marks ".

message = "This is a string";
message = This is not a string;

We can combine two strings using the + operator, for example:

string1 = "This is "; // (1)!
string2 = "a string";
string3 = string1 + string2;
print(string3);

1. Remember that we need a space either at the end of the first string or at the beginning of the second string, or else the concatenation will be "This isa String"

We can also include other variables in a string, for example:

number = 42;
string = "My favorite number is " + number;
print(string);

Strings can be split at various points. This is very useful for, as an example, removing file extensions (such as .tif from file names).

If we had the following string: myfile.tif and wanted to get only the file name, we could split the string at the ..

string = "myfile.tif";
split_string = split(string, '.');
print(split_string[0] + ", " + split_string[1]);