ASP.NET 2.0 All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Handling Strings

In This Chapter

✓	Setting up Strings
✓	Working with special HTML characters
✓	Taking apart and putting together strings
✓	Converting to and from strings
✓	Connecting strings with StringBuilder

The .NET framework includes hundreds of classes that range from general-purpose classes (which you’ll use all the time) to specialized classes that you might use only on rare occasions. In this mini-book, I cover several of the general-purpose classes.

In this chapter, the focus is on the various classes that support string manipulation. This includes the String class itself, as well as a few others including RegEx, which is for testing whether a string matches a pattern.

In this chapter, I cover a class called StringBuilder. This class is for piecing together strings. However, the more traditional class String also includes methods for piecing together strings. In the section “Piecing Together Strings with a StringBuilder” at the end of this chapter, I discuss exactly why Microsoft gave us a separate class for piecing together strings. (Make sure you read that section; it tells you some extremely important stuff for developing high-performance Web sites.)

Formatting Strings

The .NET framework includes a powerful string-formatting mechanism that you can access through the String class’s Format method. The formatting mechanism shows itself in many places, including the formatting ...