In this chapter we will introduce the tools available for working with strings in Mathematica. Strings are used as arguments, option values, and as the output to many functions. Strings are also used to represent file names that you import and export. In Mathematica, strings are represented by any concatenation of characters enclosed in double quotes. Strings are so ubiquitous that almost every modern programming language has a string datatype and dozens of functions for operating on and with strings. Strings are used across many disciplines to represent filenames, data, and other objects: linguists working with text data study representation, classification, and patterns involved in audio and text usage biologists dealing with genomic data as strings are interested in sequence structure and assembly and perform extensive statistical analysis of their data programmers operate on string data for such tasks as text search, file manipulation, and text processing.

The book, which follows on the well-known An Introduction to Mathematica Programming, provides an example-driven primer on the foundations of the Mathematica programming language. This article is an excerpt from the recently released book, Programming with Mathematica: An Introduction by Paul Wellin © 2013.

Greek letters mathematica