Creating substrings in F#

Reading a chunk of a string into another string is based on the position of the characters in the string. The characters in the string form an array of chars and we can read parts of it by referring to the required array positions of the characters. This is no different from popular OOP languages like C# and Java. The only difference is the syntax.

Let’s start with the following string:

let longString = "The message couples the distressed heat before a purchase."

The random sentence generator site has a lot of similar meaningless sentences for testing.

The most simplistic application of substrings is to read one character:¨

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Data type conversion in F#

F# has much the same primitive data types as C#. Here are some examples:

let integer = 123
let floating = 23.
let dec = 24M
let bool = true
let text = "This is some string"
let character = 'c'

Occasionally we may need to convert one primitive type to another.

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Infix operators in F#

F# makes the distinction between “prefix” and “infix” functions. The word prefix means that something comes before something else. Prepositions in many Indo-European languages, like “in”, “for” and “on” in English are examples of prefixes, they are placed in front of another word, most often a noun: in the house, at the station, for that purpose.

Prefix functions are how we most often define and call functions in F#. The function name comes first which is then followed by the function arguments.

Here’s a function that adds two numbers:

let addTwoNumbers x y = x + y

Unsurprisingly we call the above function as follows:

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