Substring meaning in DSA

A substring is defined as a contiguous part of a string, i.e., a string inside another string.

Substrings of String “neveropen”

Characteristics of Substring:

•  Starting position of a substring is greater than or equal to the starting index of the string and the ending position is less than or equal to the final position.
• The maximum length of a substring can be at most the same as the length of the string.
• In a substring, contiguous characters from the string are kept.

How to generate a Substring?

The steps to generate a substring are as follows:

• Select the starting index of the substring.
• Determine the length (say k) of the substring.
• From the starting index, pick k contiguous characters from the string and concatenate them.
• The string thus formed is the desired substring.

Applications of Substring

Substrings are used as a tool to manipulate small portions of a larger string, here are some of the common applications: 

• Searching: Imagine a large student dataset, where you want to find a particular name. By searching for a substring that matches the desired output, we can quickly identify the information we need.
• Text-Processing: If you want to extract all the emails or phone numbers from a large dataset, substring will make the task simple and faster.
• Other uses of substring can be data cleaning or string manipulation where working with text and string data are extensively used.

Advantages of Substring:

• Substrings can be used to extract a specific part of a larger string. This can be useful in applications where only a portion of a string is needed.
• Substring operations can be used in a wide range of applications, including text processing, search algorithms, and data analysis.

Disadvantages of Substring:

• Substring operations can be memory-intensive, especially when working with very large strings. This can lead to performance issues in applications that rely heavily on substring operations.
• Substring operations can be error-prone if not implemented correctly, leading to unexpected behavior or incorrect results.
• Substring operations may not always be the best approach for working with text data, and other techniques such as regular expressions or parsing may be more appropriate in certain situations.

What else can you read?

• Substring in C++
• Substring in Java
• Check if a string is substring of another
• Program to print all substrings of a given string