For an application I am working on, I needed to integrate dynamic content from a webpage. Unfortunately the website doesn’t offer any kind of xml feed, so I needed to transform the xhtml from the webpage into a format for my application.

For a project I am currently working on I needed to convert a tab separated database file into a Datatable. The database file is a plain text file and the fields are tab separated, every record is a new line.

Just extend the string class, I thought, and add a function ToDataTable() which converts the string to a corresponding datatable. But then I found out that Microsoft decided to make the string class sealed. This means that you are not allowed to extend it.

But what if you really want to extend it? Build a wrapper? That is a lot of work and not very maintainable. Then I found out you can actually extend a sealed class by putting “this” as a parameter.

Public static DataTable ToDataTable(this string s)

If you put a function like this somewhere in a (static) class you can use it like this:

String TestString = “Test”;
DataTable Dt = TestString.ToDataTable();

With this you can, after reading out the database file, convert the text very easily to a DataTable en bind it to a Gridview.

Click on read more for the complete code to convert the tab separated string to a DataTable.