Teilzeichenkette

Teilzeichenkette is a German term that translates to substring in English. A substring is a contiguous sequence of characters within a string. For example, in the string "programming", "program" is a substring, as is "gram" and "ming".

In computer science, substrings are fundamental to many string manipulation operations. They are used in tasks such as searching for specific patterns within a text, extracting data from strings, and performing text editing. Many programming languages provide built-in functions or methods to extract substrings from a given string. These functions typically require the starting position and the length of the desired substring.

The concept of a substring is closely related to that of a subsequence. A subsequence is also a sequence of characters derived from a string, but the characters do not need to be contiguous. For instance, in "programming", "pogrm" is a subsequence but not a substring. The distinction is important in algorithms that deal with string comparisons and pattern matching.

Teilzeichenkette has various applications. In text editors, selecting a portion of text to copy, cut, or paste involves defining a substring. In search engines, finding occurrences of a query within a document relies on substring matching algorithms. Regular expressions, a powerful tool for pattern matching, extensively use the concept of substrings to define and locate complex patterns. The efficiency of substring operations can be critical in performance-sensitive applications.