Sebastian Nozzi asked on the beginners list: I've been struggling a bit with some basics about Strings for which I couldn't find an answer (yet). 1) How to construct a String from Characters? For example, I want to construct a String from the Chatacter literals: $H $I Character cr $T $H $E $R $E 2) How to replace a sequence of Characters in a String for others? For exaple, I want to replace every 'HI' (in this case only one) for 'HELLO' in the String above (not necesarily destructively, getting a new String is also ok). Is there a quick way to do that? Thanks in advance! Smalltalk isn't known for being a scripting language. The runtime and object model are very similar to Ruby, but it is lacking all of the little Perl-isms that we associate with scripting languages. To deal with the input characters, it is useful to have them in an array. A traditional Smalltalk array with characters would look like this #($a $b $c) but it isn't obvious what to do with t