[RESOLVED] Help - Cannot implicitly convert type 'char' to 'string'

[The Thing]

Hi again folks,

If I have a String object as in -

String myString = "ABCDEF";

I can write the following -

Console.WriteLine(myString1[2]);

and it will compile, outputting C to the console.

That's all well and good, but what I'd like to be able to do is something like -

myButton.Text = myString[2];

But I get the following error when I try to compile the program -

Cannot implicitly convert type 'char' to 'string'

I've tried casting the char to a string as in -

String myNewString = (String)(myString[2]);

but that does not work either

The word "implicitly" in the error I receive leads me to believe that what I'm trying to do is possible, but I've just got the syntax wrong, am I correct in that assumption?

Can anyone show me how to get this working? Thank you.

[The Thing]

I found a solution to my problem, here it is.

String myString = "ABCDEF";
myButton.Text = myString.Substring(2, 1); // myButton's text will be 'C' 

//If we develop this further we can have something like

String myString = "ABCDEF";

Button[] myButtons = new Button[myString.Length];

for(int i = 0; i <= myString.Length; i++)
{

     myButtons[i] = new Button();

     myButtons[i].Text = myString.Substring(i, 1);

     //Within this loop we can programmatically add these buttons to our forms, etc. 

}

Hope this was of help to someone

[jmcilhinney]

You're trying to cast a char object as a string. A char object is not a string so that cannot be done. You must explicitly convert your char object to a string:

String myNewString = myString[2].ToString();

[The Thing]

Hi jmcilhinney, thanks for the info.

Can you explain the difference between casting and converting?

[jmcilhinney]

Have you ever heard the expression "to cast something in a new light"? It means to look at the same thing in a different way, which is exactly how "cast" is used in programming. Casting doesn't change the type of the underlying object, only the type of the reference used to access it, e.g.

object obj = "Hello World";
string str = (string)obj;

The object that obj refers to is a string, so the cast doesn't change the type of the object. It simply creates a reference of a different type to the same object.

It's very important to always remember that OOP is designed to mimic the real world. This casting is not a programming phenomenon. We do the same thing in life all the time. Let's say that you went to the vet with your pet. When you walk in the vet knows that you have an animal, but they don't know exactly what type of animal. You tell the vet that your pet is a dog. The vet had an Animal reference to your pet dog and you just cast it as a Dog. The dog itself was completely unaffected, but now the vet knows that your pet has all the attribute of a dog, while before they only knew it had the attributes of an animal. That's exactly why you cast in programming too: to get access to the members of the object that belong to the type you're casting as.

[prats_victory]

hey thanks a lot i got my problem solved