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 cover the following:

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

• Representing 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)

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

• Creating System.DateTime or System.DateTimeOffset objects from string values, such as those that a user might enter, and displaying them as formatted strings (recipe 2-7)

• Mathematically manipulating DateTime or DateTimeOffset objects in order to compare dates or add/subtract periods of time from a date (recipe 2-8)

• Converting dates and times across time zones (recipe 2-9)

• Sorting the contents of an array or an ArrayList collection (recipe 2-10)

• Copying the contents of a collection to an array (recipe 2-11)

• Analyzing or manipulating the contents of an array (recipe 2-12)

• Using the standard generic collection classes to instantiate a strongly typed collection (recipe 2-13)

• Using generics to define your own general-purpose container or collection class that will be strongly typed when it is used (recipe 2-14)

• Serializing object state and persisting it to a file (recipe 2-15)

• Reading user input from the Windows console (recipe 2-16)