Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

4.2. Strings

You will need to use character strings in most of your programs—headings, names, addresses, product descriptions, messages—the list is endless. In Java, ordinary strings are objects of the class String. The String class is a standard class that comes with Java, and it is specifically designed for creating and processing strings. The definition of the String class is in the java.lang package so it will be accessible in all your programs by default.

4.2.1. String Literals

You have already made extensive use of string literals for output. Just about every time the println() method was used in an example, you used a string literal as the argument. A string literal is a sequence of characters between double quotes:

"This is a string literal!"

This is actually a String literal with a capital S—in other words, a constant object of the class String that the compiler creates for use in your program.

As I mentioned in chapter 2, some characters can't be entered explicitly from the keyboard so you can't include them directly in a string literal. You can't include a newline character by pressing the Enter key since this will move the cursor to a new line. You also can't include a double quote character as it is in a string literal because this is used to indicate where a string literal begins and ends. You can specify all of these characters in a string in the same way as you did for char constants in chapter 2—you use an escape sequence. All the escape sequences you saw when ...