## 4.22 Representing text in strings

SWI-Prolog supports the data type string. Strings are a time and space efficient mechanism to handle text in Prolog. Strings are stored as a byte array on the global (term) stack and thus destroyed on backtracking and reclaimed by the garbage collector.

Strings were added to SWI-Prolog based on an early draft of the ISO standard, offering a mechanism to represent temporary character data efficiently. As SWI-Prolog strings can handle 0-bytes, they are frequently used through the foreign language interface (section 9) for storing arbitrary byte-sequences.

Starting with version 3.3, SWI-Prolog offers garbage collection on the atom-space as well as representing 0-bytes in atoms. Although strings and atoms still have different features, new code should consider using atoms to avoid too many representations for text as well as for compatibility with other Prolog implementations. Below are some of the differences:

- creation
  Creating strings is fast, as the data is simply copied to the global stack. Atoms are unique and therefore more expensive in terms of memory and time to create. On the other hand, if the same text has to be represented multiple times, atoms are more efficient.
- destruction
  Backtracking destroys strings at no cost. They are cheap to handle by the garbage collector, but it should be noted that extensive use of strings will cause many garbage collections. Atom garbage collection is generally faster.

String objects by default have no lexical representation and thus can only be created using the predicates below or through the foreign language interface (See chapter 9. There are two ways to make read/1 read text into strings, both controlled through Prolog flags. One is by setting the double_quotes flag to `string` and the other is by setting the backquoted_string flag to `true`. In latter case, ``Hello world`` is read into a string and write_term/2 prints strings between back-quotes if `quoted` is `true`. This flag provides compatibility with LPA Prolog string handling.

string_to_atom(?String, ?Atom)
  Logical conversion between a string and an atom. At least one of the two arguments must be instantiated. Atom can also be an integer or floating point number.
string_to_list(?String, ?List)
  Logical conversion between a string and a list of character codes characters. At least one of the two arguments must be instantiated.
string_length(+String, -Length)
  Unify Length with the number of characters in String. This predicate is functionally equivalent to atom_length/2 and also accepts atoms, integers and floats as its first argument.
string_concat(?String1, ?String2, ?String3)
  Similar to atom_concat/3, but the unbound argument will be unified with a string object rather than an atom. Also, if both String1 and String2 are unbound and String3 is bound to text, it breaks String3, unifying the start with String1 and the end with String2 as append does with lists. Note that this is not particularly fast on long strings as for each redo the system has to create two entirely new strings, while the list equivalent only creates a single new list-cell and moves some pointers around.
sub_string(+String, ?Start, ?Length, ?After, ?Sub)
  Sub is a substring of String starting at Start, with length Length and String has After characters left after the match. See also sub_atom/5.