JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

Strings

A string is a sequence of Unicode letters, digits, punctuation characters, and so on -- it is the JavaScript data type for representing text. As you’ll see shortly, you can include string literals in your programs by enclosing them in matching pairs of single or double quotation marks. Note that JavaScript does not have a character data type such as char, like C, C++, and Java do. To represent a single character, you simply use a string that has a length of 1.

String Literals

A string is a sequence of zero or more Unicode characters enclosed within single or double quotes (' or "). Double-quote characters may be contained within strings delimited by single-quote characters, and single-quote characters may be contained within strings delimited by double quotes. String literals must be written on a single line; they may not be broken across two lines. If you need to include a newline character in a string literal, use the character sequence \n , which is documented in the next section. Examples of string literals are:

""  // The empty string: it has zero characters
'testing'
"3.14"
'name="myform"'
"Wouldn't you prefer O'Reilly's book?"
"This string\nhas two lines"
"pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter"

As illustrated in the last example string shown, the ECMAScript v1 standard allows Unicode characters within string literals. Implementations prior to JavaScript 1.3, however, typically support only ASCII or Latin-1 characters in strings. As we’ll ...