Chapter 4. String Processing in Tcl

This chapter describes string manipulation and simple pattern matching. Tcl commands described are: string, append, format, scan, and binary. The string command is a collection of several useful string manipulation operations.

Strings are the basic data item in Tcl, so it should not be surprising that there are a large number of commands to manipulate strings. A closely related topic is pattern matching, in which string comparisons are made more powerful by matching a string against a pattern. This chapter describes a simple pattern matching mechanism that is similar to that used in many other shell languages. Chapter 11 describes a more complex and powerful regular expression pattern matching mechanism.