Swift Characters

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Swift Characters (Character Literals)

A character in Swift is a single character String literal such as A", "!", c", addressed by the data type Character. Or we can say that the character data type is designed to represent a single Unicode character.

Declaring Character Variable

Following is the syntax to declare a variable with character (char) data type −

var char : Character = "A" 

Example of Characters

This example demonstrates how you can create character variable by assigning the character literals. Here, we are creating two characters variables and printing their values:

import Foundation

let char1: Character = "A"
let char2: Character = "B"

print("Value of char1 \(char1)")
print("Value of char2 \(char2)")

Output

The output of the above code is:

Value of char1 A
Value of char2 B

Illegal Character Initialisation

If we try to store more than one character in a Character type variable or constant, then Swift will not allow that and give an error before compilation.

Example

This example demonstrates an illegal character initialisation:

import Foundation

// Following is illegal in Swift 
let char: Character = "AB"

print("Value of char \(char)")

The output of the above code is:

main.swift:4:23: error: cannot convert value of type 'String' to specified type 'Character'
let char: Character = "AB"

Empty Character Variable Is Not Allowed

Also, we are not allowed to create an empty Character variable or constant which will have an empty value. If we try to do we will get an error.

Example

This example demonstrates an illegal try of creating empty character variable:

import Foundation

// Creating empty Character
let char1: Character = ""
var char2: Character = ""

print("Value of char1 \(char1)")
print("Value of char2 \(char2)")

The output of the above code is:

main.swift:4:24: error: cannot convert value of type 'String' to specified type 'Character'
let char1: Character = ""
                       ^~
main.swift:5:24: error: cannot convert value of type 'String' to specified type 'Character'
var char2: Character = ""
                       ^~

Accessing Characters from Strings

A string represents a collection of Character values in a specified order. So we can access individual characters from the given String by iterating over that string with a for-in loop −

Example

import Foundation

// Accessing Characters from Strings using for-in loop
for ch in "Hello" {
   print(ch)
}

The output of the above code is:

H
e
l
l
o

Concatenating String with Character

In Swift, we can concatenate String with a character using the + and += operators. Both the operators concatenate the given character at the end of the specified string.

While concatenating a string with a character we required an explicit conversion from character to string because Swift enforces strong typing. Also, we are not allowed to concatenate a character(variable) with a string.

Example

Swift program to concatenate a string with a character using the + operator.

import Foundation

let str = "Swift"
let char: Character = "#"

// Concatenating string with character using + operator
let concatenatedStr = str + String(char)

print(concatenatedStr)

The output of the above code is:

Swift#

Example

Swift program to concatenate a string with a character using the += operator.

import Foundation

var str = "Swift"
let char: Character = "!"

// Concatenating string with character using += operator
str += String(char)
print(str)

The output of the above code is:

Swift!