Tip Jar: Concatenating A Delimited String

Update: I also wrote a more generic version using anonymous delegates for .NET 2.0 as a followup to this post.

Here’s one for the tip jar. Every now and then I find myself concatening a bunch of values together to create a delimited string. In fact, I find myself in that very position on a current project. In my case, I am looping through a collection of objects concatenating together three separate strings, each for a different property of the object (long story).

Usually when building such a string, I will append the delimiter to the end of the string I am building during each loop. But after the looping is complete, I have to remember to peel off that last delimiter. Let’s look at some code, simplified for the sake of this discussion.

The first thing we’ll define is a fake class for demonstration purposes. It only has one property.

internal class Fake
{
    public Fake(string propValue)
    {
        this.SomeProp = propValue;
    }

    public string SomeProp;
    
    public static Fake[] GetFakes()
    {
        return new Fake[] {new Fake("one")
                , new Fake("two")
                , new Fake("three")
            };
    }
}

Now let’s look at one way to create a pipe delimited string from this array of Fake instances.

Fake[] fakes = Fake.GetFakes();

string delimited = string.Empty;
foreach(Fake fake in fakes)
{
    delimited += fake.SomeProp + "|";
}

delimited = delimited.Substring(0, delimited.Length - 1);
Console.WriteLine(delimited);

I never liked this approach because it is error prone. Do you see the problem? Yep, I forgot to make sure that delimited wasn’t empty when I called substring. I should correct it like so.

if(delimited.Length > 0)
    delimited = delimited.Substring(0, delimited.Length - 1);

When I write code like this, I almost always add a little disclaimer in the comments because I know someone down the line is going to call me an idiot for not using the StringBuilder class to concatenate the string. However, if I know that the size of the strings to concatenate and the number of concatenations will be small, there is no point to using the StringBuilder. String Concatenations will win out. It all depends on the usage pattern.

But for the sake of completeness, let’s look at the StringBuilder version.

Fake[] fakes = Fake.GetFakes();

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
foreach(Fake fake in fakes)
{
    builder.Append(fake.SomeProp);
    builder.Append("|");
}

string delimited = builder.ToString();
if(delimited.Length > 0)
    delimited = delimited.Substring(0, delimited.Length - 1);
Console.WriteLine(delimited);

Aesthetically speaking, this code is even uglier because it requires more code. And as I pointed out, depending on the usage pattern, it might not provide a performance benefit. Today, a better approach from a stylistic point of view came to mind. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.

Fake[] fakes = Fake.GetFakes();

string[] delimited = new string[fakes.Length];
for(int i = 0; i < fakes.Length; i++)
{
    delimited[i] = fakes[i].SomeProp;
}

string delimitedText = String.Join("|", delimited);
Console.WriteLine(delimitedText);

Since I know in advance how many items I am concatenating together (namely fakes.Length number of items), I can fully allocate a string array in advance, populate it with the property values, and then call the static String.Join method.

From a perf perspective, this is probably somewhere between string concatenation and StringBuilder, depending on the usage pattern. But for the most part, String.Join is quite fast, especially in .NET 2.0 (though my current project is on .NET 1.1. Boohoo!).

Performance issues aside, this approach just feels cleaner to me. It gets rid of that extra check to remove the trailing delimiter. String.Join handles that for me. To me, this is easier to understand. What do you think?

Tip Jar: Concatenating A Delimited String

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