Swift Characters and Its Types

Characters are the simplest and single unit of text. Swift provides features and methods for handling string and character data types. In this article, we’ll learn more about characters, their properties and the concepts associated with them.

What are the characters in Swift?

Characters are individual Unicode values, which are numerical representations of individual characters. It handles single characters in Swift. It represents individual textual elements. The individual characters might be letters, digits, punctuation marks, symbols, or whitespace.

We assign a value to it by enclosing the character within double quotes.

var characterExample: Character = "D"

Multiple Characters

Swift does not allow multiple characters defined to a character data type variable. Doing so will throw errors in the compiler.

var characterExample: Character = "Da"

Output:

Error.swift:1:35: error: cannot convert value of type ‘String’ to specified type ‘Character.’
var characterExample: Character = “Da”
^~~~

Empty Characters

We cannot define a character variable as empty. It will lead to an error if we assign an empty character to the identifier.

var characterExample: Character = ""

Output:

Error.swift:1:35: error: cannot convert value of type ‘String’ to specified type ‘Character.’
var characterExample: Character = “”
^~

Unicode Characters

We can represent each character in Swift with a Unicode value assigned to it. This helps in dealing with characters from other languages or emojis. The following value uses the Unicode value of the heart emoji to print the character.

var heartEmojiValue = 0x2764
var heartEmoji = Character(UnicodeScalar(heartEmojiValue)!)

print(heartEmoji)

Output:

❤

Concatenation

We cannot concatenate two or more characters in Swift. It results in a result when we try to join two character type variables using the ‘+’ operator.

var char1: Character = "D"
var char2: Character = "F"
print(char1 + char2)

Output:

Error.swift:3:13: error: binary operator ‘+’ cannot be applied to two ‘Character’ operands
print(char1 + char2)
~~~~~ ^ ~~~~~

Concatenation of Character and String

We can join a character to a string using the append method of string data type.

var string1: String = "DataFlair"
var char1: Character = "!"
string1.append(char1)
print(string1)

Output:

DataFlair!

Conclusion

Swift Characters are the fundamental units of text. We can assign a value to a character data type with only one character. We cannot define an empty character variable. We cannot join two characters to each other. But we can concatenate a character to a string.