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

16.2. Fundamentals of Characters and Strings

Characters are the fundamental building blocks of Visual Basic source code. Every program is composed of characters that, when grouped together meaningfully, create a sequence that the compiler interprets as instructions describing how to accomplish a task. In addition to normal characters, a program also can contain character literals, also called character constants. A character literal is a character that is represented internally as an integer value, called a character code. For example, the integer value 97 corresponds to the character literal "a"c, and the integer value 122 corresponds to the character literal "z"c . The letter c following the closing double quote is Visual Basic’s syntax for ...