I was wondering the best way to add to a String in Swift 4. Did Apple create a better way than stringName.characters.append(“hi”)
Edit: Noted below which I never knew you used to be able to use a String.append(). I was trying to get at the fact that in Swift 4 you don't have to use .characters anymore. I was trying to help out new people to swift 4 by making a question that they might ask so that they can save time by not using .characters after a String variable.
You can invoke append(_:) directly on the String instance:
var stringName = ""
stringName.append("hi")
print(stringName) // hi
stringName.append(" John")
print(stringName) // hi John
Likewise, you can use the += operator of String for the concatenation
var stringName = ""
stringName += "hi"
print(stringName) // hi
stringName += " John"
print(stringName) // hi John
For the curious one, the implementation of both of these approaches make use of the same backend (/core) append(...) call. Quoting swift/stdlib/public/core/String.swift:
extension String { // ... public mutating func append(_ other: String) { _core.append(other._core) } // ... } extension String { // ... public static func += (lhs: inout String, rhs: String) { if lhs.isEmpty { lhs = rhs } else { lhs._core.append(rhs._core) } } // ... }
According to Swift 4 Documentation, String values can be added together (or concatenated) with the addition operator (+) to create a new String value:
let string1 = "hello"
let string2 = " there"
var welcome = string1 + string2
// welcome now equals "hello there"
You can also append a String value to an existing String variable with the addition assignment operator (+=):
var instruction = "look over"
instruction += string2
// instruction now equals "look over there"
You can append a Character value to a String variable with the String type’s append() method:
let exclamationMark: Character = "!"
welcome.append(exclamationMark)
// welcome now equals "hello there!"
string.append(anotherString)