Character Data

Except for a few idiosyncrasies, numeric data is represented and manipulated in C# and the .NET Framework more or less like it’s represented and handled in the real world. The same can’t be said for character data. As you probably know, computers store data as zeros or ones. (Actually, they store data in a bunch of tiny little capacitors, but we think of them as zeros and ones.) In order to represent an alphabet, the individual characters must be ENCODED.

In the .NET Framework, characters are encoded using the Unicode standard, which has replaced the older ASCII encoding as an industry standard. The basic units of encoding character data in the .NET Framework are System.Char (most people pronounce this as “char” like burnt wood, not “care” like “character”), which represents a single character, and System.String, which represents an array of characters. (We’ll discuss the Array type in the next chapter. It’s the most basic of a group of classes that allow you to treat zero or more instances of an object as a single entity.)