Sams Teach Yourself Java™ in 24 Hours, Sixth Edition

Storing Text in Strings

Strings store text and present it to users. The most basic element of a string is a character.  A character is a single letter, number, punctuation mark, or other symbol.

In Java programs, a character is one of the types of information that can be stored in a variable. Character variables are created with the char type in a statement such as the following:

char keyPressed;

This statement creates a variable named keyPressed that can store a character. When you create character variables, you can set them up with an initial value, as in the following:

char quitKey = '@';

The value of the character must be surrounded by single quotation marks.

A string is a collection of characters. You can set up a variable to hold a string ...