Chapter 16. Strings, Characters and Regular Expressions | Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers (2nd Edition)

The chief defect of Henry King Was chewing little bits of string.

Hilaire Belloc

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.

William Strunk, Jr.

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.

Blaise Pascal

The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matterit's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Mark Twani

Mum's the word.

Miguel de Cervantes

Objectives

In this chapter you will learn:

To create and manipulate immutable character String objects of class String.

To create and manipulate mutable character String objects of class StringBuilder.

To manipulate character objects of structure Char.

To use regular expressions in conjunction with classes Regex and Match.

Outline

16.1 Introduction
16.2 Fundamentals of Characters and Strings
16.3 String Constructors
16.4 String Indexer, Length Property and CopyTo Method
16.5 Comparing Strings
16.6 Locating Characters and Substrings in Strings
16.7 Extracting Substrings from Strings
16.8 Concatenating Strings
16.9 Miscellaneous String Methods
16.10 Class StringBuilder
16.11 Length and Capacity Properties, EnsureCapacity Method and Indexer of Class StringBuilder
16.12 Append and AppendFormat Methods of Class StringBuilder
16.13 Insert, Remove and Replace Methods of Class StringBuilder
16.14 Char Methods
16.15 Card Shuffling and Dealing Simulation
16.16 Regular Expressions and Class Regex
16.16.1 Regular Expression Example
16.16.2 Validating User Input with Regular Expressions
16.16.3 Regex methods Replace and Split
16.17 Wrap-Up