I'm back again to write about Strings in Groovy. If you are like me, then you use strings for all sorts of things. Groovy has some nice features that make it a pleasure.

GStrings

In Groovy, you can declare strings with single or double quotes. Double quotes denote GStrings--strings that allow expressions.
Here is an example of how easy it is to print out variables:

int age = 10
String name = 'Danny'

//java
System.out.println("This person is " + name + "and they are" + age + "years old");

//groovy
println("This person is ${name} and they are ${age} years old")

You'll notice a few things. First, no ugly System.out.println. println works just fine :^: Second, you'll notice that GStrings allows for a much more readable expression. Both lines are perfectly valid but why choose the first??? Note, GString and String are two distinct classes and mixing the two can lead to issues. I have yet to experience it, but the Groovy site warns

Multi-line Strings

Another nice feature about Groovy is that it allows you to instantiate strings that span multiple lines:

def name = 'Danny'

def text = """\
hello there ${name}
how are you today?
"""

Substrings

I'm in love with substrings. At my job, I have to parse all sorts of records and Groovy's substring notation makes me happy. I had an issue a few weeks ago where I needed the first character of a string to be lower case and this was my solution:

String string = 'TransactionName'
string = string[0].toLowerCase() + string [1..-1]

This illustrates a few things:

• You can treat strings as an array of characters
  
• You can grab a substring with [x..y]
  
• [x..y] is inclusive unlike java's substring(x,y) where y is exclusive
  
• You can easily reference from right to left with -x (-1 is the first character from the end)
  
• Aubstring is bidirectional! (string[-1..0] would reverse the string)

That's all I have for today. Keep it groovy!