Karaktersorokat

Karaktersorokat is the Hungarian term for character strings or character sequences. In computing, they are ordered sequences of characters used to store text. They vary in length, from empty to long, and may comprise letters, numbers, punctuation, or symbols from one or more writing systems.

Encoding: Internally, a string is represented as a sequence of code points (Unicode code points in modern systems). In memory and IO, these code points are encoded into bytes using encodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-16. In some languages, a string is a sequence of code units (e.g., UTF-16 units), which may affect handling of characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane.

Operations: Common operations include length calculation, indexing to retrieve a character, slicing to extract substrings, concatenation to join strings, and searching. Strings often support pattern matching via regular expressions. In many languages strings are immutable; in others they are mutable.

Applications: Strings are central to text processing, user input, data storage, file formats, programming language syntax, and communication protocols. They are commonly used with APIs that expect or return textual data. Character encoding and normalization are important to ensure consistent representation.

Challenges: Unicode normalization forms (NFC, NFD) are used to combine diacritics and other marks; grapheme clusters can complicate counting and iteration. Normalization affects equality and display. Encoding errors can occur when a string contains invalid byte sequences. Security concerns include injection, encoding mishaps, and locale-specific collation.

See also: string, character encoding, Unicode, grapheme, normalization, regular expressions.