This chapter presented the Framework Class Library’s string- and character-processing capabilities. We overviewed the fundamentals of characters and strings. You saw how to determine the length of strings, copy strings, access the individual characters in strings, search strings, obtain substrings from larger strings, compare strings, concatenate strings, replace characters in strings and convert strings to uppercase or lowercase letters.

We showed how to use class StringBuilder to build strings dynamically. You learned how to determine and specify the size of a StringBuilder object, and how to append, insert, remove and replace characters in a StringBuilder object. We then introduced the character-testing methods of type Char that enable a program to determine whether a character is a digit, a letter, a lowercase letter, an uppercase letter, a punctuation mark or a symbol other than a punctuation mark, and the methods for converting a character to uppercase or lowercase.

In the online Regex section, we discussed classes Regex, Match and MatchCollection from namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions and the symbols that are used to form regular expressions. You learned how to find patterns in a string and match entire strings to patterns with Regex methods Match and Matches, how to replace characters in a string with Regex method Replace and how to split strings at delimiters with Regex method Split. In the next chapter, you’ll learn how to read data from and write data to text files. We’ll also demonstrate C#’s object-serialization mechanism that can convert objects into bytes so you can output and input objects.