String is an alias for a list of characters.

String constants in Haskell are values of type String. That means if you write a string literal like "hello world", it will have the type [Char], which is the same as String.

Note: You can ask the compiler to automatically infer different types with the -XOverloadedStrings language extension, for example "hello world" :: Text. See IsString for more information.

Because String is just a list of characters, you can use normal list functions to do basic string manipulation. See Data.List for operations on lists.

Performance considerations

╭─────┬───┬──╮  ╭─────┬───┬──╮  ╭─────┬───┬──╮  ╭────╮
│ (:) │   │ ─┼─>│ (:) │   │ ─┼─>│ (:) │   │ ─┼─>│ [] │
╰─────┴─┼─┴──╯  ╰─────┴─┼─┴──╯  ╰─────┴─┼─┴──╯  ╰────╯
        v               v               v
       'a'             'b'             'c'

IsString is used in combination with the -XOverloadedStrings language extension to convert the literals to different string types.

For example, if you use the text package, you can say

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings  #-}

myText = "hello world" :: Text

Internally, the extension will convert this to the equivalent of

myText = fromString @Text ("hello world" :: String)

Note: You can use fromString in normal code as well, but the usual performance/memory efficiency problems with String apply.

Splits the argument into a list of lines stripped of their terminating \n characters. The \n terminator is optional in a final non-empty line of the argument string.

For example:

>>> lines ""           -- empty input contains no lines
[]
>>> lines "\n"         -- single empty line
[""]
>>> lines "one"        -- single unterminated line
["one"]
>>> lines "one\n"      -- single non-empty line
["one"]
>>> lines "one\n\n"    -- second line is empty
["one",""]
>>> lines "one\ntwo"   -- second line is unterminated
["one","two"]
>>> lines "one\ntwo\n" -- two non-empty lines
["one","two"]

When the argument string is empty, or ends in a \n character, it can be recovered by passing the result of lines to the unlines function. Otherwise, unlines appends the missing terminating \n. This makes unlines . lines idempotent:

(unlines . lines) . (unlines . lines) = (unlines . lines)

words breaks a string up into a list of words, which were delimited by white space (as defined by isSpace). This function trims any white spaces at the beginning and at the end.

>>> words "Lorem ipsum\ndolor"
["Lorem","ipsum","dolor"]
>>> words " foo bar "
["foo","bar"]

Appends a \n character to each input string, then concatenates the results. Equivalent to foldMap (s -> s ++ "\n").

>>> unlines ["Hello", "World", "!"]
"Hello\nWorld\n!\n"

Note that unlines . lines /= id when the input is not \n-terminated:

>>> unlines . lines $ "foo\nbar"
"foo\nbar\n"

unwords joins words with separating spaces (U+0020 SPACE).

>>> unwords ["Lorem", "ipsum", "dolor"]
"Lorem ipsum dolor"

unwords is neither left nor right inverse of words:

>>> words (unwords [" "])
[]
>>> unwords (words "foo\nbar")
"foo bar"