Strings

Strings are delimited with single quotes.

message = 'Hello, Lumen!'
println message

Concatenation

Use .. to join strings (or a string and another value) together:

name = 'Ryan'
text = 'Hello, ' .. name

println text

No apostrophes inside strings

Because a single quote (') is the string delimiter, you can’t put a literal apostrophe inside a string — the tokenizer would read it as the end of the string. There’s no escape sequence for this yet, so the convention used in the examples is to substitute a backtick where an apostrophe would go:

print 'What`s your name? '

This is printed exactly as written — the backtick is not converted to an apostrophe, it’s just a visual stand-in the source code uses to avoid breaking the string literal. Keep this in mind if you’re generating output that should read naturally; there is currently no way to produce a real ' character inside a string.

Converting to and from numbers

Strings don’t automatically convert to numbers (or vice versa) in arithmetic or comparisons — use one of the four conversion built-ins, all of which take the value first and the destination variable second:

n = 0
str2int '42' &n        # n = 42 (int)

f = 0.0
str2float '3.14' &f    # f = 3.14 (float)

s1 = ''
int2str 42 &s1          # s1 = '42'

s2 = ''
float2str 3.5 &s2       # s2 = '3.500000'

str2int/str2float fall back to 0/0.0 on unparseable input rather than raising an error. See Built-in Functions for the exact semantics.

String Manipulation