Strings sind []const u8

Zig has no dedicated string type. A piece of text is simply a slice of bytes, so you reuse the same tools you already know for arrays. 📦

A Zig string is the type []const u8: a read-only window over a run of 8-bit bytes. Each byte holds one number from 0 to 255.

String literals live in read-only memory, so their type is []const u8. The const means you can read the bytes but never write through this slice.

The element type u8 is an unsigned 8-bit integer. Treating text as u8 makes Zig honest: a string is raw bytes, not magic characters.

A slice carries both a pointer and a length, so the string knows its own size. You never need a separate length variable or a terminator.

Zig source files are UTF-8, so literals store text as UTF-8 bytes. One emoji or accented letter may take several bytes, not one.

Because text is bytes, .len returns the byte count, not the character count. For plain ASCII the two numbers match exactly.

Indexing a string gives you back a single u8 byte value, not a character object. For ASCII, that byte is the letter is code.

Unlike C, a Zig slice does not rely on a trailing zero byte to mark its end. The stored length already tells code where text stops.

You print text with the {s} format specifier, which tells Zig to render the bytes as a string instead of as numbers.

Drop the const to get a writable []u8 slice. Then you can change bytes in place, as long as they live in memory you own.

Think about the real type behind a Zig string literal.

You learned that Zig text is just []const u8: read-only bytes with a length, UTF-8 by convention, indexed and measured in bytes. 🎯