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Generally, string is a thin piece of fiber which is used to tie, bind,
or hang other objects. String can be made from a variety of fibres. You can get different kinds, twine for example. The term has more specific meanings,
within certain academic disciplines.
Biology
A string is a chain of biochemicals.
Mathematics and Computer Science
In various branches of mathematics and computer science, strings are sequences of various simple objects (symbols, tokens, characters, etc.), used in many contexts. One may consider
sequences of tokens in a language grammar, states in automata, representations of
DNA, characters (literal string) or
bits (binary string). The abstract
definition of a formal language is a set of strings constructed from
a given alphabet according to given rules.
In computer science, the term may refer to both actual data and
data structures to store the data (including abstract data structures) e.g., string data
structure in STL or literal string. A literal string is probably the first thing most people
actually think of when they hear the word string.
An empty string is a string that has no elements.
String data structure is close to the notion of array. The main difference that arrays
are basically structures of fixed size, while strings may be of arbitrary size. Arrays may be used as an implementation of string
abstract data type.
Music
A string is a vibrating cord of metal, nylon, gut or other substance that vibrates to produce a tone in a
variety of musical instruments. Strings can
also refer to the section of an orchestra or band consisting in stringed
instruments. See string instrument.
Physics
A string is a concept in quantum string
theory; see also: string theory.
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