Working with strings

The simplest string in Nushell is the single-quoted string. This string uses the ' character to surround some text. Here’s the text for hello world as a single-quoted string:

Single-quoted strings don’t do anything to the text they’re given, making them ideal for holding a wide range of text data.

For more complex strings, Nushell also offers double-quoted strings. These strings use the " character to surround text. They also support the ability escape characters inside the text using the \ character.

For example, we could write the text hello followed by a new line and then world, using escape characters and a double-quoted string:

Escape characters let you quickly add in a character that would otherwise be hard to type.

• \" - double-quote character
• \' - single-quote character
• \\ - backslash
• \/ - forward slash
• - formfeed
• \r - carriage return
• \n - newline (line feed)
• \t - tab

More complex string use cases also need a new form of string: string interpolation. This is a way of building text from both raw text and the result of running expressions. String interpolation combines the results together, giving you a new string.

String interpolation uses $" " and $' ' as ways to wrap interpolated text.

For example, let’s say we have a variable called $name and we want to greet the name of the person contained in this variable:

By wrapping expressions in (), we can run them to completion and use the results to help build the string.

String interpolation has both a single-quoted, , and a double-quoted, $" ", form. These correspond to the single-quoted and double-quoted strings: single-quoted string interpolation doesn’t support escape characters while double-quoted string interpolation does.

The split row command creates a list from a string based on a delimiter. For example, let colors = ("red,green,blue" | split row ",") creates the list [red green blue].

The command will create a table from a string based on a delimiter. For example let colors = ("red,green,blue" | split column ",") creates a table, giving only column to each element.

Finally, the split chars command will split a string into a list of characters.

Many string functions are subcommands of the str command. You can get a full list using .

For example, you can look if a string contains a particular character using str contains: