There was a time when people thought of computers as manipulating numeric values exclusively. Early computers were first used to calculate missile trajectories, and programming was taught in the math department of major universities.
Today, most programs are concerned more with strings of characters than with numbers. Typically these strings are used for word processing, document manipulation, and creation of web pages.
VB.NET provides built-in support for a fully-functional String type. More importantly, VB.NET 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 are aided by the use of regular expressions. VB.NET 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 VB.NET String type and the .NET Framework System.String class that it aliases. You will see how to extract substrings, 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.
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