Chapter 9. .NET

Microsoft's .NET Framework, usable with Visual Basic, C#, and C++ (among other languages), offers a shared regular-expression library that unifies regex semantics among the languages. It's a full-featured, powerful engine that allows you the maximum flexibility in balancing speed and convenience.

Each language has a different syntax for handling objects and methods, but those underlying objects and methods are the same regardless of the language, so even complex examples shown in one language directly translate to the other languages of the .NET language suite. Examples in this chapter are shown with Visual Basic.

In This Chapter Before looking at what's in this chapter, it's important to emphasize that this chapter relies heavily on the base material in Chapters 1 through 6. I understand that some readers interested only in .NET may be inclined to start their reading with this chapter, and I want to encourage them not to miss the benefits of the preface (in particular, the typographical conventions) and the earlier chapters: Chapters 1, 2, and 3 introduce basic concepts, features, and techniques involved with regular expressions, while Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer important keys to regex understanding that directly apply to .NET's regex engine.

This chapter first looks at .NET's regex flavor, including which metacharacters are supported and how,^[1] as well as the special issues that await the .NET programmer. Then there's a quick overview of .NET's regex-related object model, and how it's been designed to allow you to wield a regex, followed by a detailed look at each of the core regex-related classes. It all ends with an example of how to build a personal regex library by encapsulating pre-built regular expressions into a shared assembly.

^[1] This book covers .NET "Version 2002." While researching this book, I uncovered a few bugs, which Microsoft tells me will be fixed in the 2004 release of .NET.