VB.NET Text Manipulation Handbook

Text forms an integral part of many applications. In earlier versions of Visual Basic, the details of how text was being handled were hidden, limiting your ability to control the way an application would deal with it, and your ability to manage its performance or memory usage. In the .NET Framework, you are given much more control. .NET has powerful text handling capabilities. For example text is stored in Unicode format, enabling application internationalization. More fundamentally however, and fitting with the object-oriented nature of the Framework, strings are objects. As such they require a certain amount of care in how you use them in your applications. The .NET Framework also includes a number of powerful tools within the System.Text namespace; while String and StringBuilder are objects which are easy to use, their simplicity might encourage you to ignore the performance and efficiency implications of what you are doing. In addition, .NET introduces the powerful text matching and manipulation capabilities of Regular Expressions. These enable you to parse, search and modify text using a compact language, increasing further the efficiency of your text manipulation operations. Book jacket.