Insert a Character at an Index in a Scala String

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll see how to insert a character at a specific index in a Scala String.

2. Using String Concatenation

The first approach we’ll explore is using naive String manipulation by getting the desired substrings and concatenating all elements.

For instance, let’s add the character ‘z‘ to the string ‘Hello‘ after the index 2 (i.e., after letter ‘e‘):

scala> val s = "Hello"
s: String = Hello

scala> val idx = 2
idx: Int = 2

scala> s.substring(0,idx) + 'z' + s.substring(idx, 5)
res0: String = Hezllo

We start by getting the initial part of the original string: We extract the substring until the index where we want to insert the new character is reached. Then, we add up the new character and the remaining suffix of the original string.

Notably, the original string remains unchanged, and we return a new string.

3. Using the String.patch() Method

The previous solution has a bit of boilerplate. It’s also easy to introduce a bug when doing String manipulation manually. Fortunately, Scala contains a String.patch() method that makes this job easier:

scala> s.patch(idx, "z", 0)
res0: String = Hezllo

The String.patch() method receives three parameters: the index where to insert the new characters, the new characters, and how many characters to remove from the index. This last parameter may be unexpected, but we can read the method signature as “At index 2, let’s remove 0 characters, and then add the new substring ‘z‘.”

Let’s see in practice how this last parameter influences the output:

scala> s.patch(2, "z", 0)
res0: String = Hezllo

scala> s.patch(2, "z", 1)
res1: String = Hezlo

scala> s.patch(2, "z", 2)
res2: String = Hezo

In the second example, the first ‘L‘ character was removed, i.e., the first element after index 2. In the second example, we remove the two characters after index 2, i.e., the elements at index 2 and 3, which were both ‘L‘ characters.

Just like in the previous approach, the original string remains unchanged, and we return a new string.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we saw how to insert a new character at a specific String index.

We started with a naive approach using basic String manipulation and concatenation, and then we saw the Scala String.patch() method.