Data Manipulation

Abstract

Most applications need to manipulate some form of data. The Microsoft .NET Framework provides many techniques that simplify or improve the efficiency of common data manipulation tasks. The recipes in this chapter describe how to do the following:

• Manipulate the contents of strings efficiently to avoid the overhead of automatic string creation due to the immutability of strings (recipe 2-1)

• Represent basic data types using different encoding schemes or as byte arrays to allow you to share data with external systems (recipes 2-2, 2-3, and 2-4)

• Validate user input and manipulate string values using regular expressions (recipes 2-5 and 2-6)

• Create System.DateTime objects from string values, such as those that a user might enter, and display DateTime objects as formatted strings (recipe 2-7)