One Pager Cheat Sheet

• The article stresses the importance of string manipulation in software development, considering it a vital skill in processing human-readable data, and highlights its significance in coding interviews; it then introduces the intended comprehensive guide which aims to teach techniques and best practices for string manipulation, aiding both seasoned programmers and beginners to become more effective professionals.
• A string is a data type in programming that represents a sequence of characters, which can be immutable (cannot be changed once created, as in Java and Python) or mutable (can be modified, as in C++); basic string operations include declaring and initializing strings, finding the length of a string, concatenating strings, and extracting parts of a string through slicing or finding a substring, forming the foundation for complex string manipulation tasks.
• This section covers fundamental string operations including concatenation (combining strings), extracting substrings, finding the length of a string, comparing strings, converting characters' case, and trimming and padding strings, featuring examples in multiple programming languages such as JavaScript, Python, Java, C++, and Go.
• The passage discusses how to search for substrings and characters within strings in various programming languages (JavaScript, Java, Python, Go, C++) using indexOf, contains, find, Index, and includes methods, it also explains pattern matching using regular expressions (regex), and demonstrates globbing with wildcard characters like * and ? for matching file types.
• This document provides code snippets in several programming languages for four common string manipulation algorithms: checking if a string is a palindrome, checking if two strings are anagrams, finding the longest common substring of two strings, and reversing a string.
• The article discusses the best practices and optimization techniques for managing strings, touching on memory considerations, avoiding common pitfalls, performance optimization, and secure string handling. These include understanding immutable strings and employing StringBuilder classes for efficient string modification, cautious use of functions to avoid unnecessary copies of strings, using .equals() for string equality rather than ==, ensuring proper encoding/decoding of strings, preferential use of indexOf over regular expressions, using compile-time constants, avoiding SQL injection vulnerabilities through prepared statements, sanitizing user input, and secure handling of sensitive data.