Concatentation and other operations

A bunch of strings can be joined to make a longer one by puting them inside a pair of brackets, and separating them with commas. For example
>> ["Entering", " ", "Rose", " ", "County"]

   Entering Rose County

The same can be achieved by using the addition operator. For example

>> s = "Entering" + " " + "Rose" + " " + "County"

   Entering Rose County

If n is a positive integer and s is a string, n * s or s * n will create a new string which is s repeated n times.

>> s = "haha ... ";
>> 5 * s
   haha ...haha ...haha ...haha ...haha ...

If s and t are two strings of the same length, or one of them has length 1, then s - t returns a row vector of integers, which are the differences between the ASCII codes of s and t. For example

>> s = "bcdefg" - "a"
   1 2 3 4 5 6

>> s = "uvwxyz" - "UVWXYZ"
   32 32 32 32 32 32

If s is a string, and x is a integer scalar, or a vector of integers having the same length as x, then s + x returns a vector of the same length as s whose ASCII values are those of s plus the value(s) of x.

>> s = "BCDEFG" + 32
   bcdefg
Note s - x and x - x are defined in the same manner.
>> s = "bounding" - ("a" - "A")
   BOUNDING
When numbers or vectors are being added to or subtracted from a string, the resulting must still have characters within the range of ASCII values. Otherwise the operation is not carried out.

oz 2009-12-22