String Arrays

Let's say you've got a bunch of email addresses all in one long string like:

me@bla.com,bla@bla.com,123@bla.com,noob@bla.com,helloworld@bla.com

And you want to separate these into individual email addresses.

Here's how:

Dim emails As String = "me@bla.com,bla@bla.com,123@bla.com,noob@bla.com,helloworld@bla.com"
Dim cleanEmails As String()
Dim s As String
cleanEmails = Split(emails, ",")

For Each s In cleanEmails
Response.Write(s & "
")
Next

This will write to the webform as:

me@bla.com
bla@bla.com
123@bla.com
noob@bla.com
helloworld@bla.com

Getting the difference between two dates

I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked to provide the difference between two dates and the equal number of times anything to do with dates as left mean tearing what's left of my hair out.

So here's a couple of useful things:

The TimeSpan Structure

Example Usage:

Get the difference in days between two dates:

Public Function GetDays(ByVal date1 As Date, ByVal date2 As Date) As Integer
Dim span As TimeSpan = date1 - date2
Return span.Days
End Function

Eg. Get number of days between now and 1st Jan 2000

GetDays(Date.Now, "01/01/00")

or alternatively we can use DateDiff

Public Function GetTheDays(ByVal date1 As Date, ByVal date2 As Date) As Integer
Return DateDiff(DateInterval.Day, date1, date2)
End Function