Editing String (computer science) (section)

== Character string-oriented languages and utilities ==
Character strings are such a useful datatype that several languages have been designed in order to make string processing applications easy to write. Examples include the following languages:
* [[AWK]]
* [[Icon (programming language)|Icon]]
* [[MUMPS]]
* [[Perl]]
* [[Rexx]]
* [[Ruby (programming language)|Ruby]]
* [[sed]]
* [[SNOBOL]]
* [[Tcl]]
* [[TTM (programming language)|TTM]]

Many [[Unix]] utilities perform simple string manipulations and can be used to easily program some powerful string processing algorithms. Files and finite streams may be viewed as strings.

Some [[application programming interface|API]]s like [[Multimedia Control Interface]], [[embedded SQL]] or [[printf]] use strings to hold commands that will be interpreted.

Many [[scripting programming language]]s, including Perl, [[Python (programming language)|Python]], Ruby, and Tcl employ [[regular expression]]s to facilitate text operations. Perl is particularly noted for its regular expression use,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/108/EssentialPerl.html#re|title=Essential Perl|quote=Perl's most famous strength is in string manipulation with regular expressions.|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120421014328/http://cslibrary.stanford.edu/108/EssentialPerl.html#re|archive-date=2012-04-21}}</ref> and many other languages and applications implement [[Perl Compatible Regular Expressions|Perl compatible regular expression]]s.

Some languages such as Perl and Ruby support [[string interpolation]], which permits arbitrary expressions to be evaluated and included in string literals.