"Squiggles" is my preferred word here. There are a bunch of technical terms like Glyph and Codepoint and Grapheme, but I find squiggles are often what somebody wanted when they used something that works on "characters" and are disappointed with the results.
Advice elsewhere is correct. You almost certainly don't want anything in your high level language other than strings. No "array of characters" no slicing, all that stuff is probably smell. They're like the API in many crypto libraries for doing ECB symmetric encryption. 99% of people using it would have been better off if the Stack Overflow answer they're about to read is explaining what they should be doing instead.
Advice elsewhere is correct. You almost certainly don't want anything in your high level language other than strings. No "array of characters" no slicing, all that stuff is probably smell. They're like the API in many crypto libraries for doing ECB symmetric encryption. 99% of people using it would have been better off if the Stack Overflow answer they're about to read is explaining what they should be doing instead.