Janet 1.4.0-655d4b3 Documentation
(Other Versions: 1.4.0 1.3.1)

Strings, Keywords, and Symbols

Janet supports several varieties of types that can be used as labels for things in your program. The most useful type for this purpose is the keyword type. A keyword begins with a colon, and then contains 0 or more alphanumeric or a few other common characters. For example, :hello, :my-name, ::, and :ABC123_-*&^%$ are all keywords.

Keywords, symbols, and strings all behave similarly and can be used as keys for tables and structs. Symbols and keywords are optimized for fast equality checks, so are preferred for table keys.

The difference between symbols and keywords is that keywords evaluate to themselves, while symbols evaluate to whatever they are bound to. To have a symbol evaluate to itself, it must be quoted.

# Evaluates to :monday
:monday

# Will throw a compile error as monday is not defined
monday

# Quote it - evaluates to the symbol monday
'monday

# Our first define, 'monday'
(def monday "It is monday")

# Now the evaluation should work - monday evaluates to "It is monday"
monday

The most common thing to do with a keyword is to check it for equality or use it as a key into a table or struct. Note that symbols, keywords and strings are all immutable. Besides making your code easier to reason about, it allows for many optimizations involving these types.

# Evaluates to true
(= :hello :hello)

# Evaluates to false, everything in janet is case sensitive
(= :hello :HeLlO)

# Look up into a table - evaluates to 25
(get {
    :name "John"
    :age 25
    :occupation "plumber"
} :age)

Strings can be used similarly to keywords, but there primary usage is for defining either text or arbitrary sequences of bytes. Strings (and symbols) in janet are what is sometimes known as ˝8-bit clean˝; they can hold any number of bytes, and are completely unaware of things like character encodings. This is completely compatible with ASCII and UTF-8, two of the most common character encodings. By being encoding agnostic, janet strings can be very simple, fast, and useful for for other uses besides holding text.

Literal text can be entered inside quotes, as we have seen above.

"Hello, this is a string."

# We can also add escape characters for newlines, double quotes, backslash, tabs, etc.
"Hello\nThis is on line two\n\tThis is indented\n"

# For long strings where you don't want to type a lot of escape characters,
# you can use 1 or more backticks (`) to delimit a string.
# To close this string, simply repeat the opening sequence of backticks
``
This is a string.
Line 2
    Indented
"We can just type quotes here", and backslashes \ no problem.
``

Strings, symbols, and keywords can all contain embedded utf-8. It is recomended to embed utf-8 literally in strings rather than escaping it if it is printable.

"Hello, 👍"

Substrings

The string/slice function is used to get substrings from a string. Negative integers can be used to index from the end of the string.

(string/slice "abcdefg") # -> "abcdefg"
(string/slice "abcdefg" 1) # -> "bcdefg"
(string/slice "abcdefg" 2 -2) # -> "cdef"
(string/slice "abcdefg" -4 -2) # -> "ef"

Finding Substrings

Janet has multiple functions for finding and replacing strings. The Janet string finding functions do not work on patterns or regular expressions; they only work on string literals. For more flexible searching and replacing, see the peg module.

(string/find "h" "h h h h") #-> 0
(string/find-all "h" "h h h h") #-> @[0 2 4 6]
(string/replace "a" "b" "a a a a") #-> "b a a a"
(string/replace-all "a" "b" "a a a a") #-> "b b b b"

Splitting Strings

The string/split function can be used to split strings or buffer on a delimiting character. This can be used as a quick and dirty function for getting fields from a csv line or getting words from a sentence.

(string/split "," "abc,def,ghi") #-> @["abc" "def" "ghi"]
(string/split " " "abc def ghi") #-> @["abc" "def" "ghi"]

Concatenating strings

There are many ways to concatenate strings. The first, most common way is the string function, which takes any number of arguments and creates a string that is the concatenation of all of the arguments.

(string "abc" 123 "def") # -> "abc123def"

The second way is the string/join function, which takes an array or tuple of strings and joins them together. string/join can also take an optional separator string which is inserted between items in the array. All items in the array or tuple must be byte sequences.

(string/join @["abc" "123" "def"]) #-> "abc123def"
(string/join @["abc" "123" "def"] ",") # -> "abc,123,def"

This has the advantage over the string function that one can specify a separator. Otherwise, the behavior can be easily emulated using the splice special form.

(= (string ;@["a" "b" "c"])
   (string/join @["a" "b" "c"])) # -> true

Upper and lower case

The string library also provides facilities for converting strings to upper case and lower case. However, only ascii is supported for case transformations. The functions string/ascii-upper and string/ascii-lower return a new string that has all character in the appropriate case.

(string/ascii-upper "aBcdef--*") #-> "ABCDEF--*"
(string/ascii-lower "aBc676A--*") #-> "abc676a--*"