In simplest terms, a String is an collection (referred to in programming as an "array") of characters. If you wanted to have a String that said "Reddit", it would literally be an array of character values ['R', 'e', 'd', 'd', 'i', 't']. The most fundamental difference between strings and primitive types such as "int" are that primitives are single values. Strings are collections of values (specifically, a collection of characters.) Characters themselves are primitive types. In addition, primitive types are pieces of data. Strings are objects, which are instances of classes. As far as classes go...basically, the people who made Java built a lot of code so Strings could be easy to use by programmers. (This is also why "String" is capitalized: the name of the class has a capital S.) Sorry if this is too technical...but it should answer your questions. More on reddit.com

First method of the article is charAt... Great start! Then you realise this is probably every method available order alphabetically... This could be reduce to a "5 methods to know" to be really interesting.

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I highly suggest looking up String's [split() method](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split(java.lang.String). First step, run split to get your String[], then loop through with your length criteria.

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There is no existing function. I wrote something like this before for strings (named after the similar PHP function ). Might be useful to you: public static String addcslashes(String s) { int len = s.length(); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(len); for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) { char c = s.charAt(i); switch (c) { case '\\': sb.append('\\').append('\\'); break; case '\n': sb.append('\\').append('n'); break; case '\r': sb.append('\\').append('r'); break; case '\0': sb.append('\\').append('0'); break; case '\"': sb.append('\\').append('"'); break; default: sb.append(c); } } return sb.toString(); } More on reddit.com