Strings

Abstract

When we think about strings, we humans normally assume that strings are a series of characters that form words or phrases that we can understand. But in assembly language, any list or array of contiguous memory places is considered a string, whether it’s human-understandable or not. Assembly provides us with a number of powerful instructions for manipulating these blocks of data in an efficient way. In our examples, we will use readable characters, but keep in mind that in reality assembly does not care if the characters are readable. We will show how to move strings around, how to scan them, and how to compare strings.