Visual Basic 2005 for Programmers: Deitel Developer Series, Second Edition

16.1. Introduction

This chapter introduces the FCL’s string and character processing capabilities, and demonstrates how to use regular expressions to search for patterns in text. The techniques presented in this chapter can be employed in text editors, word processors, page-layout software, computerized typesetting systems and other kinds of text-processing software. Previous chapters presented some basic string-processing capabilities. In this chapter, we discuss in detail the text-processing capabilities of class String and type Char from the System namespace and class StringBuilder from the System.Text namespace.

We begin with an overview of the fundamentals of characters and strings in which we discuss character literals and string literals. ...