Summary

This chapter provided an overview of collections, strings, and regular expressions. First, you learned how to work with the ArrayList , HashTable , and SortedList collections and use them to represent lists of items and lists of key and value pairs.

Next, you examined various methods of working with strings. You learned how to format strings by using the Format and ToString methods and reviewed methods and properties for working with strings included in the .NET framework. You also learned how to use the StringBuilder class to efficiently manipulate the contents of large strings.

Finally, you examined the topic of regular expressions. You learned how to use the most important regular expression classes and use regular expression metacharacters to perform advanced pattern matching and pattern replacement.