Strings

String literals use double quotes. Interpolated strings use backticks.

let plain = "a literal"
let name = "peko"
let greeting = `hello, ${name}`

Any expression can appear inside ${ ... }, not just a name:

let message = `deployed ${project.name} ${project.version}`
let size = `${items.size()} items`
let path = `${root}/${segment}`

Interpolation is the normal way to build strings. There is no format function in the language itself, and no concatenation operator is needed for the common case.

Escapes

Both literal forms accept the standard escapes:

Escape	Meaning
\n, \t, \r	Newline, tab, carriage return.
\\	A backslash.
\" and \'	A quote.
\`	A backtick, for use inside an interpolated string.
\xNN	A byte, written as two hex digits.
\u{HEX}	A unicode scalar, written as one to six hex digits.

A malformed escape is a diagnostic rather than a silent pass, so a bad \u{...} is reported where it appears.

Characters

char is a separate type from string. A character literal uses single quotes and accepts the same escapes:

let tab = '\t'

Working with strings

string is a class, so text operations are methods:

let text = "src/main.peko"
let size = text.size()
let cut = text.index_of("/")
let tail = text.substring(cut + 1, text.size())
let is_src = text.starts_with("src")

Two behaviors worth knowing:

• index_of returns -1 when the needle is absent, so check before using the result as an offset. An empty needle matches at 0.
• substring takes a start and an end, not a start and a length.

Because string is a class, == on two strings routes to the Equals trait and compares contents rather than identity.