Scala String is the Java String class. String literals are enclosed with double quotes ("). Multi-line string literals are enclosed in triple double quotes:

val s = """This is 
    a multi-line
    string"""

The above string will have empty space at the beginning of 2nd and 3rd line. To strip them, use stripMargin and | (or any character by passing it into stripMargin method) as follows:

val s = """This is 
    |a multi-line
    |string""".stripMargin

Multi-line string literal also escapes ' and " automatically.

StringOps offers more methods on String via implicit conversion, such as treating a String as a sequence of characters in a for loop or use map on them. To explicitly convert a String object to a collection type, use toArray or toList method.

String substitution

Prepending s to any string literal allows the usage of variables directly in the string.

s"Hello, $name" interpolates the string with variable name. String interpolators can also take arbitrary expressions, and they should be enclosed in ${}.

If the string contains escaped double quotes, use triple quotes instead: s """This is a quote: \"$quote\"""".

printf style formatting

Prepending f to any string literal allows the creation of simple formatted strings, similar to printf in other languages. When using the f interpolator, all variable references should be followed by a printf-style format string, like %d. For example, f"$name%s is $height%2.2f meters tall".

The f interpolator is typesafe. If you try to pass a format string that only works for integers but pass a double, the compiler will issue an error.

The raw Interpolator

The raw interpolator is similar to the s interpolator except that it performs no escaping of literals within the string.

Useful APIs

  • capitalize: convert a string to upper case.
  • split: takes a String, a Char, or regular expressions and splits the string.
  • replaceAll: It replaces all occurrences (can be specified with regex) with another string. replaceFirst does the same for first occurrence only.

Regular Expressions

scala.util.matching.Regex class provides the functionality. To construct a regex object, usr r method of the String class. You need to use raw string """...""" to avoid escaping backslashes:

val pattern = """\s+[0-9]+\s+""".r
  • pattern.findAllIn(str) to find all matches in str. It returns an iterator.
  • pattern.findFirstIn(str) to find the first match and return an Option[String].
  • pattern.findPrefixOf(str) to check whether the beginning of the given string matches.

Use replace methods (such as replaceAllIn) to replace all matches in a given string with another string:

pattern.replaceAllIn(str, rep)

Extract matched patterns

Use groups to extract subexpressions from matches. Put parentheses around the subexpression to form a group. For example,

val pattern = "([0-9+]) ([a-z]+)".r

Then val pattern(num, item) = str assign num to match of [0-9+] and item to match of [a-z]+. You can think of this as unapply method.