Extracting substrings

Clojure:
Extracting substrings

How to:

Clojure makes it easy to work with strings. For extracting substrings, subs is your go-to function:

(let [text "ClojureRocks"]
  (subs text 7)) ; => "Rocks"

(let [text "ClojureRocks"]
  (subs text 0 7)) ; => "Clojure"

And that’s it—give it a start index, and optionally an end index, and you’ll chop the string just how you need it.

Deep Dive

Extracting substrings isn’t new—been around since the early days of programming. In Clojure, subs is a straightforward function. It’s part of Clojure’s Java interop capabilities, piggybacking on Java’s substring method. Two key points: negative indices aren’t allowed, and it’s zero-based (starts counting at zero). So remember that or you’ll be one off.

Alternatives? Sure. Regex with re-find and re-matcher for complex patterns, or split if you’re dividing at a delimiter. Each tool has its place, but nothing beats subs for simplicity.

Implementation-wise, subs doesn’t copy characters, it shares the original string’s character array. Efficient, but if your original string is huge and all you need is a tiny bit, you might inadvertently keep the whole big string in memory.

Clojure:Extracting substrings

How to:

Deep Dive

See Also:

Clojure:
Extracting substrings