In programming, a 'string' is typically used to handle what type of data?

In programming, a 'string' is a data type specifically designed to handle text data. Strings consist of a sequence of characters, which can include letters, numbers, symbols, and whitespace. This makes strings an ideal choice for representing any form of text, such as words, sentences, or even entire paragraphs.

Using strings allows programmers to manipulate and process text information effectively, such as displaying messages to users, reading input data, or storing textual data in files. The flexibility of strings allows them to be used in various programming tasks, including concatenation (joining two strings together), searching for substrings, and formatting output.

The other options—numeric data, Boolean values, and date values—represent different types of data that are not suitable for handling as strings. Numeric data involves numbers that can be used for calculations, Boolean values represent true/false states, and date values are formatted representations of time. While these data types may sometimes be converted to strings for displaying purposes, they do not fundamentally represent text data as strings do.