what's the C# equivalent of string$ from basic

Question

And is there an elegant linqy way to do it?

What I want to do is create string of given length with made of up multiples of another string up to that length

So for length - 9 and input string "xxx" I get "xxxxxxxxx" (ie length 9)

for a non integral multiple then I'd like to truncate the line.

I can do this using loops and a StringBuilder easily but I'm looking to see if the language can express this idea easily.

(FYI I'm making easter maths homework for my son)

Answer 1

My Linqy (;)) solution would be to create an extension method. Linq is language integrated query, so why the abuse? Im pretty sure it's possible with the select statement of linq since you can create new (anonymous) objects, but why...?

Answer 2

No, nothing simple and elegant - you have to basically code this yourself.

You can construct a string with a number of repeated characters, but ot repeated strings, i.e.

string s = new string("#", 6);    // s = "######"

To do this with strings, you would need a loop to concatenate them, and the easest would then be to use substring to truncate to the desired final length - along the lines of:

string FillString(string text, int count)
{
    StringBuilder s = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i = 0; i <= count / text.Length; i++)
        s.Add(text);

    return(s.ToString().Substring(count));
}

Answer 3

A possible solution using Enumerable.Repeat.

const int TargetLength = 10;

string pattern = "xxx";

int repeatCount = TargetLength / pattern.Length + 1;

string result = String.Concat(Enumerable.Repeat(pattern, repeatCount).ToArray());

result = result.Substring(0, TargetLength);

Console.WriteLine(result);
Console.WriteLine(result.Length);