---
title: characters
framework: swift
role: symbol
role_heading: Instance Property
path: swift/string/characters
---

# characters

A view of the string’s contents as a collection of characters.

## Declaration

```swift
var characters: String { get set }
```

## Discussion

Discussion Previous versions of Swift provided this view since String itself was not a collection. String is now a collection of characters, so this type is now just an alias for String.