how much bytes will take???

Question

Hello experts,

can anyone tell me below string how much bytes will take?

string abc = "a";

Thanks in advance:)

Answer 1

From my article on strings:

In the current implementation at least, strings take up 20+(n/2)*4 bytes (rounding the value of n/2 down), where n is the number of characters in the string. The string type is unusual in that the size of the object itself varies. The only other classes which do this (as far as I know) are arrays. Essentially, a string is a character array in memory, plus the length of the array and the length of the string (in characters). The length of the array isn't always the same as the length in characters, as strings can be "over-allocated" within mscorlib.dll, to make building them up easier. (StringBuilder does this, for instance.) While strings are immutable to the outside world, code within mscorlib can change the contents, so StringBuilder creates a string with a larger internal character array than the current contents requires, then appends to that string until the character array is no longer big enough to cope, at which point it creates a new string with a larger array. The string length member also contains a flag in its top bit to say whether or not the string contains any non-ASCII characters. This allows for extra optimisation in some cases.

I suspect that was written before I had a chance to work with a 64-bit CLR; I suspect in 64-bit land each string takes up either 4 or 8 more bytes.

Answer 2

If you ask about size of string object then it is wrong to ask about its size, without debugger it is impossible to say what exactly is it. Not sure that it is possible with debugger either. string uses pointers internally.

If you ask about size of sequence of chars that it contains then it is 4, because strings are stored in UTF-16. All chars in Basic Multilingual Plane are coded with two bytes.