Strings and characters in Clojure they have no surprises. They map respectively to java.lang.String and java.lang.Character. Both, strings and characters they evaluate to themselves.
"This is a string"
;= "This is a string"
(type "This is a string")
;= java.lang.String
"Strings in Clojure
can be multi lines
as well!!"
;= "Strings in Clojure \n can be multi lines \n as well!!"
\a ; this is the character 'a'
\A ; this is the character 'A'
\\ ; this is the character '\'
\u0041 ; this is unicode for 'A'
\tab ; this is the tab character
\newline ; this is the newline character
\space ; this is the space character
\a
;= \a
(type \a)
;= java.lang.Character
Since they map to their Java’s native type you can use all java.lang.String methods
(.toUpperCase "This is a string")
;= "THIS IS A STRING"
(seq (.split "This is a string" " "))
;= ("This" "is" "a" "string")
;; a string is a sequence of characters
(seq "This is a string")
;= (\T \h \i \s \space \i \s \space \a \space \s \t \r \i \n \g)
There are a number of Clojure functions available to manipulate Strings:
;; to create a string
(str 123)
;= "123"
(str 1 "and" 3)
;= "1and3"
;; basically str calls .toString()
;; on the given arguments
(str (new java.util.Date))
;= "Sat Mar 23 02:27:32 GMT 2013"
;; check if the argument is a string
(string? "a string")
;= true
(string? 1)
;= false