From array of Char to String

[Ning Yin]

Hi Julia users, 

I was trying to convert an array of char's to string, and I've noticed functions such as string or CharString, but non of these seem to work for my case:

Julia console:

==============

julia> a = ['a', 'b', 'c']

3-element Array{Char,1}:

 'a'

 'b'

 'c'

julia> string(a)

"Char[a,b,c]"

julia> CharString(a)

ERROR: ArgumentError("UTF32String data must be NULL-terminated")

===============

Any idea? I'm using Julia Version 0.4.0-dev+238 (just cloned from github). 

Thanks!

-Ning

[Jacob Quinn]

Try join()

[Ning Yin]

Thanks! That worked. 

I also found out that both string(a...) and CharString(a...) worked, though I don't understand why the '...' is necessary here.

[Isaiah Norton]

That is the splice operator (also known as "splat"). It causes the contents of `a` to be passed as indvidual arguments rather than passing `a` as an array. So, string() behaves differently.

[John Myles White]

We should really have a FAQ for this. This is something that tripped me up for a while.

I’ll write up sometime.

 — John

[Ivar Nesje]

It also seems kind of reasonable to special case string() for Array{Char,1}. It will be inconsistent with other Array stringifications, but print/show/writemime/dump/xdump/showcompact/... can still give emphasize the array property with an array representation.

[Steven G. Johnson]

On Tuesday, August 19, 2014 8:04:29 AM UTC-4, Ning Yin wrote:

I was trying to convert an array of char's to string, and I've noticed functions such as string or CharString, but non of these seem to work for my case:

Julia console:

==============

julia> a = ['a', 'b', 'c']

CharString is deprecated in Julia 0.3.   You can, however, do:

     utf32(a)

on an array of Char.  See the documentation for utf32 in the manual.