What is a string in C++?

In C++, a string is best defined as a sequence of characters used to represent text. This means that a string can include letters, digits, punctuation marks, spaces, and any character from the character set used in the encoding (such as ASCII). Strings are fundamental in programming as they allow for the manipulation of textual data, which is essential for many applications ranging from user input to data processing.

The C++ standard library provides a std::string class that makes it easy to create, modify, and interact with string data. This class comes with various built-in functions for operations like concatenation, substring extraction, searching, and comparing strings, which facilitate effective text handling.

The other options describe different concepts in programming: a collection of numbers refers to data structures like arrays or vectors, a boolean data type consists of true/false values (often represented as 0 and 1), and an array of integers is a collection specifically storing integer values. None of these accurately capture the concept of a string as it relates to text representation in C++.