Handling Strings

You've decided to lead the way into the future by letting your users type in sentences as commands to your program. Unfortunately, this means that you have to parse (i.e., break down to individual words) what they type. So what was that string function that lets you break a string into smaller strings again? We'll get an overview of string handling in this topic. Strings are supported by the .NET String class in Visual Basic. You declare a string this way:

Dim strText As String

As with other types of variables, you can also initialize a string when you declare it, like this:

Dim myString As String = "Welcome to Visual Basic"

A string can contain up to approximately 2 billion Unicode characters, and it can grow or shrink to match the data you place in it. There are quite a number of string-handling functions built into Visual Basic.NET. For example, you use Left, Mid, and Right to divide a string into substrings, you find the length of a string with Len, and so on.

Besides the string-handling functions that are built into VB .NET, many .NET framework functions are built into the String class that VB .NET uses. For example, the Visual Basic UCase function will convert strings to upper case, and so will the String class's ToUpper method. That means that I can convert a text string to uppercase either by using the VB .NET UCase function, or the String class's ToUpper method:

Option Strict On
Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        Dim strText1 As String = "welcome to visual basic"
        Dim strText2 As String
        Dim strText3 As String
        strText2 = UCase(strText1)
        strText3 = strText1.ToUpper
        System.Console.WriteLine(strText2)
        System.Console.WriteLine(strText3)
    End Sub

End Module

In this example, I'm changing some text to upper case, and you can see the result in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1: Working with strings in Visual Basic.

Here's another example—I can use the Mid function to get a substring from the middle of another string if I pass it that string, the location to start extracting the substring from (starting a position 1), and the length of the substring. I can do the same thing with the String class's Substring method, if I pass it the location to start extracting the substring from (starting a position 0 this time), and the length of the substring. In this case, I'll extract "look" from "Hey, look here!":

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        Dim strText1 As String = "Hey, look here!"
        Dim strText2 As String
        Dim strText3 As String
        strText2 = Mid(strText1, 6, 4)
        strText3 = strText1.Substring(5, 4)
        System.Console.WriteLine(strText2)
        System.Console.WriteLine(strText3)
    End Sub
End Module

Here's what you see when you execute this example:

look
look
Press any key to continue

For reference, the popular Visual Basic string-handling functions and methods appear in Table 2.7, organized by task (new in VB .NET: note that you now cannot use LSet and RSet to assign one data type to another). Note in particular the string-trimming functions, which are very handy and can trim leading or trailing spaces or other characters.

Here's another point you should know—to concatenate (join) strings together, you can use the & or + operators, or the String class's Concat method. Here's an example we saw in Chapter 1, breaking up a long string over several lines:

Dim Msg As String
Msg = "Well, there is a problem " _
& "with your program. I am not sure " _
& "what the problem is, but there is " _
& "definitely something wrong."

Dim strString1 As String * 1000

Dim strString1 As New VB6.FixedLengthString(1000)