str

str is a common shorthand for a string, a data type used to represent text as a sequence of characters. The term is used in many programming languages and libraries, typically as a type name or a variable containing text.

In Python, str is a built-in immutable sequence type that stores Unicode characters. A value can be created with a literal like 'hello' or by calling str() on an object. Strings support indexing, slicing, and a wide set of methods for case change, search, replace, and split. They can be encoded to bytes (for example UTF-8) and decoded back to text.

Other languages treat strings differently. In C and C++, there is no standard type named str; text is represented by arrays of char or by string classes, and str is sometimes used as a variable name. In Rust, a string slice (&str) represents a view into UTF-8 text, while String is a growable, heap-allocated string. In many languages the concept is simply called string or text, with varying semantics for mutability and encoding.

Because of Unicode and encoding considerations, the storage, memory model, and performance of str values depend on language, encoding, and operations used. Understanding the specific language's string type is important for correct handling of text, interoperability, and performance.