[brmgb]

No, “de” in French has the same meaning as “of” and sounds exactly as weird here. That’s clearly not where this comes from. Also the translation of string with this meaning is “chaîne de caractères”.

[dan-robertson]

Is «chaîne de caractères» what French programmers call strings? (That would surprise me much as English-speaking programmers calling them ‘strings of characters’ would)

[dawnofdusk]

Yeah it's the French word. You can always say just "chaîne" when it's unambiguous. Or you can just use the English word