# Division for Strings
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381
**Category:** Internals & Design
**Created:** [March 26, 2019, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381 "2019-03-26T22:30:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 7
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@asprionj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/asprionj)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2019, 10:30pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/1 "2019-03-26T22:30:17Z")
Just had this silly idea when trying to prepend a string to an existing one. When appending, one can do:
```julia
a = "1"
a *= ",2" # "1,2"
```
Now, we could use division for prepending:
```julia
a = "1"
a /= "0," # "0,1"
```
What do you think? Is this any good?
---
### Author:  [@dfdx](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/dfdx)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2019, 10:35pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/2 "2019-03-26T22:35:15Z")
`/` doesn’t hold general rule that:
```julia
a *= ",2"
# same as
a = a * ",2"
```
instead you get:
```julia
a /= "0,"
# same as
a = "0," * a
```
---
### Author:  [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2019, 10:40pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/3 "2019-03-26T22:40:26Z")
If we give division a meaning for strings, it’d likely be one that’s compatible with whatever `*` means for strings: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/13411](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/13411). In other words, it’d remove common subsequences in contrast to how `*` appends subsequences.
---
### Author:  [@StefanKarpinski](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StefanKarpinski)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2019, 2:54am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/4 "2019-03-27T02:54:55Z")
I still don’t entirely hate that. It should error if the prefix/suffix doesn’t match.
---
### Author:  [@StevenSiew](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/StevenSiew)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2019, 6:13am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/5 "2019-03-27T06:13:40Z")
Why not use
```julia
a = "1"
a =* "0." # same as a = "0." * a
```
This way you can have consistency
---
### Author:  [@Tamas\_Papp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Tamas_Papp)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2019, 6:38am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/6 "2019-03-27T06:38:41Z")
Because there is no `=*`. There is no `*=` either in the sense of having a primitive, it just expands to `*` and assignment. Eg
```julia
julia> Meta.@lower a *= 1
:($(Expr(:thunk, CodeInfo(
@ none within `top-level scope'
1 ─ %1 = a * 1
│ a = %1
└── return %1
))))
```
---
### Author:  [@GunnarFarneback](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/GunnarFarneback)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2019, 6:52pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/division-for-strings/22381/7 "2019-03-27T18:52:41Z")
> [@asprionj](#):
>
> What do you think? Is this any good?
Being able to prepend a string in this way is very useful but division is entirely the wrong operator for the functionality. It’s easy enough to try out in your own code though.
```julia
julia> Base.:/(a::AbstractString, b::AbstractString) = b * a
julia> a = "a"
"a"
julia> a /= "b"
"ba"
```