A substring is defined as a contiguous part of a string, i.e., a string inside another string.
Substrings of String “geeks”
Characteristics of Substring:
- Starting position of a substring is greater than or equal to the starting index of the string and the ending position is less than or equal to the final position.
- The maximum length of a substring can be at most the same as the length of the string.
- In a substring, contiguous characters from the string are kept.
How to generate a Substring?
The steps to generate a substring are as follows:
- Select the starting index of the substring.
- Determine the length (say k) of the substring.
- From the starting index, pick k contiguous characters from the string and concatenate them.
- The string thus formed is the desired substring.
Applications of Substring
Substrings are used as a tool to manipulate small portions of a larger string, here are some of the common applications:
- Searching: Imagine a large student dataset, where you want to find a particular name. By searching for a substring that matches the desired output, we can quickly identify the information we need.
- Text-Processing: If you want to extract all the emails or phone numbers from a large dataset, substring will make the task simple and faster.
- Other uses of substring can be data cleaning or string manipulation where working with text and string data are extensively used.
Advantages of Substring:
- Substrings can be used to extract a specific part of a larger string. This can be useful in applications where only a portion of a string is needed.
- Substring operations can be used in a wide range of applications, including text processing, search algorithms, and data analysis.
Disadvantages of Substring:
- Substring operations can be memory-intensive, especially when working with very large strings. This can lead to performance issues in applications that rely heavily on substring operations.
- Substring operations can be error-prone if not implemented correctly, leading to unexpected behavior or incorrect results.
- Substring operations may not always be the best approach for working with text data, and other techniques such as regular expressions or parsing may be more appropriate in certain situations.