As you may have noticed, in Java,
there is no variable type called string. However, although
Java does not have a built-in string type, it does provide
you will a predefined class called String which you can use
instead.1
We'll talk more about classes and
using them in later sections. However, it would be nice to at
least introduce the String class here so we can use it in
the meantime.
To instantiate a String, you simply
use the same syntax that you would if it were a type:
String s = "Hello Cyberspace";
Strings have quite a few methods
which allow you to manipulate them in every way that you could in
Perl. To read about these methods, simply use the online
documentation. We will talk about how to efficiently use the
online documentation a little bit later but you should know that
you can find the String class in the java.lang package.
1. Strings are immutable, once a String object is created
it can not
be changed. A StringBuffer object should be used to enable modification of a sequence
of characters.
