Special Edition Using Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Working with Strings

Look at the keys of your computer keyboard and you will see a lot of examples of characters, such as numbers, letters, and symbols. Visual Basic .NET provides two data types for working with character data. A Char type variable can store a single character value. The more commonly used String variable stores a group of these characters, usually a piece of text such as a word. As you have already seen in numerous examples, to identify a literal string in Visual Basic code, you use double-quotation marks (") as delimiters:

Dim MyName As String = "Brian" 

The quotation marks around a string value allow the compiler to separate it from other words, such as variable names. Quotes used to delimit a string are not actually stored ...