Summary

In this chapter you have seen that the days of having to carry around your own library of string routines like a portable life preserver are long gone. With C# and the .NET Framework, strings are a native part of the library of base classes, and as such provide you with a full host of utility methods for comparison, manipulation, formatting, and much more. You also saw that the StringBuilder class provides you with an easy-to-use set of utility methods for dynamically building strings without the performance penalty of native string concatenation.

Finally, this chapter gave you a brief introduction into the power of regular expressions and how that power can be harnessed with the Regex class. After reading through this chapter and testing out the sample code, you should be familiar with some of the things that you can do with strings and regular expressions to make your applications more powerful.