Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

STRINGREADER AND STRINGWRITER

The StringReader and StringWriter classes let a program read and write text in a string.

These classes are derived from TextReader and TextWriter and inherit the definitions of most of their properties and methods from those classes. See the preceding section “TextReader and TextWriter” for details.

The StringReader provides methods for reading lines, characters, or blocks of characters from a string. Its ReadToEnd method returns any of the string that has not already been read. The StringReader class’s constructor takes as a parameter the string that it should process.

The StringWriter class lets an application build a string. It provides methods to write text into the string with or without a new-line sequence. Its ToString method returns the StringWriter class’s string.

The StringWriter stores its string in an underlying StringBuilder class. StringBuilder is designed to make incrementally building a string more efficient than building a string by concatenating a series of values onto a String variable. For example, if an application needs to build a very large string by concatenating a series of long substrings, it may be more efficient to use a StringBuilder rather than add the strings to a normal String variable. StringWriter provides a simple interface to the StringBuilder class.

The most useful method provided by StringWriter that is not defined by the TextWriter parent class is GetStringBuilder. This method returns a reference to the underlying ...