There was a time (long, long ago, when the earth was still molten and I was in high school) when people thought of computers as manipulating numeric values exclusively. Among the first use of computers was to calculate missile trajectories during World War II, and for a very long time, programming was taught in the math department of major universities. Today, most programs are concerned more with manipulating and displaying strings of characters than with strings of numbers . Typically, these strings are used for word processing, document manipulation, and creation of web pages. C# provides built-in support for a fully functional string type. More importantly, C# treats strings as objects that encapsulate all the manipulation, sorting, and searching methods normally applied to strings of characters.
Complex string manipulation and pattern matching is aided by the use of regular expressions .
C# combines the power and complexity of regular expression syntax, originally found only in string manipulation languages such as awk and Perl, with a fully object-oriented design. In this chapter, you will learn to work with the C# string type and the .NET Framework System.String class that it aliases. You will see how to extract sub-strings , manipulate and concatenate strings, and build new strings with the StringBuilder class. In addition, you will find a short introduction to the RegEx class used to match strings based on regular expressions. |