Visual Basic .NET Text Manipulation Handbook: String Handling and Regular Expressions

The .NET Framework brings a variety of string manipulation features to the VB language, and some of these, namely regular expressions and the StringBuilder class, are something VB 6 developers may not have seen before. This book teaches you how to manipulate text using these string matching, manipulation, and replacement classes. Issues such as Localization and data conversion will also be investigated.

Every developer has to manipulate text, often on a regular basis. However, even an experienced VB.NET developer may not have fully utilized the various options now made available through the .NET Framework. The StringBuilder class is one that provides much more string manipulation methods than those provided by the String object, whereas regular expressions, although popular in Perl and other UNIX/C-like languages, are unitelligible to those not proficient in this technology. Regular Expressions provide an incoredibly powerful and compact way of matching and replacing text. The Localization chapter deals with ensuring that your application can ported to different languages and character sets.