.NET Tip: Determining the Type of a Character Variable

(Jay Miller) How do you determine what type a character variable holds? Is it a number, a letter, a punctuation mark, or somthing else? One answer is to take advantage of the built-in static methods of the System.Char data type directly. You could use Char.IsDigit(), for example, to determine whether a character variable contained a digit in the range 0-9. There are other static methods that you can use to determine if a character is a letter, symbol, punctuation, and so forth. In some instances, using these static methods may be your best choice. In my case, however, I wanted something a little different. To keep my application code clean, I wanted a single method call that could return the type of character a variable contained. One method to do this is to create an extension method for the System.Char data type that returns the desired information.