How to declare a fixed-length string in VB.NET?

Question

How do i Declare a string like this:

Dim strBuff As String * 256

in VB.NET

thanks

Answer 1

Have you tried

Dim strBuff as String

Also see Working with Strings in .NET using VB.NET

This tutorial explains how to represent strings in .NET using VB.NET and how to work with them with the help of .NET class library classes.

Answer 2

Use the VBFixedString attribute. See the MSDN info here

<VBFixedString(256)>Dim strBuff As String

Answer 3

To write this VB 6 code:

Dim strBuff As String * 256

In VB.Net you can use something like:

Dim strBuff(256) As Char

Answer 4

It depends on what you intend to use the string for. If you are using it for file input and output, you might want to use a byte array to avoid encoding problems. In vb.net, A 256-character string may be more than 256 bytes.

Dim strBuff(256) as byte

You can use encoding to transfer from bytes to a string

Dim s As String
Dim b(256) As Byte
Dim enc As New System.Text.UTF8Encoding
...
s = enc.GetString(b)

You can assign 256 single-byte characters to a string if you need to use it to receive data, but the parameter passing may be different in vb.net than vb6.

s = New String(" ", 256)

Also, you can use vbFixedString. I'm not sure exactly what this does, however, because when you assign a string of different length to a variable declared this way, it becomes the new length.

<VBFixedString(6)> Public s As String
s = "1234567890" ' len(s) is now 10