Multiplying strings in C#

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Can I "multiply" a string (in C#)?

Exact duplicate of Can I “multiply” a string (in C#)?

In Python I can do this:

>>> i = 3
>>> 'hello' * i
'hellohellohello'

How can I multiply strings in C# similarly to in Python? I could easily do it in a for loop but that gets tedious and non-expressive.

Ultimately I'm writing out to console recursively with an indented level being incremented with each call.

parent
    child
    child
    child
        grandchild

And it'd be easiest to just do "\t" * indent.

Answer 1

There is no such statement in C#; your best bet is probably your own MultiplyString() function.

Answer 2

There is an extension method for it in this post.

public static string Multiply(this string source, int multiplier)
{
   StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(multiplier * source.Length);
   for (int i = 0; i < multiplier; i++)
   {
       sb.Append(source);
   }

   return sb.ToString();
}

string s = "</li></ul>".Multiply(10);

Answer 3

If you just need a single character you can do:

new string('\t', i)

See this post for more info.

Answer 4

There's nothing built-in to the BCL to do this, but a bit of LINQ can accomplish the task easily enough:

var multiplied = string.Join("", Enumerable.Repeat("hello", 5).ToArray());

Answer 5

Per mmyers:

public static string times(this string str, int count)
{
  StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
  for(int i=0; i<count; i++) 
  {
    sb.Append(str);
  }
  return sb.ToString();
}

Answer 6

int indent = 5;
string s = new string('\t', indent);

Answer 7

One way of doing this is the following - but it's not that nice.

 String.Join(String.Empty, Enumerable.Repeat("hello", 3).ToArray())

UPDATE

Ahhhh ... I remeber ... for chars ...

 new String('x', 3)

Answer 8

As long as it's only one character that you want to repeat, there is a String constructor that you can use:

string indentation = new String('\t', indent);

Answer 9

how about with a linq aggregate...

var combined = Enumerable.Repeat("hello", 5).Aggregate("", (agg, current) => agg + current);

Answer 10

Here's how I do it...

string value = new string(' ',5).Replace(" ","Apple");

Answer 11

I don't think that you can extend System.String with an operator overload, but you could make a string wrapper class to do it.

public class StringWrapper
{
    public string Value { get; set; }

    public StringWrapper()
    {
        this.Value = string.Empty;
    }

    public StringWrapper(string value)
    {
        this.Value = value;
    }

    public static StringWrapper operator *(StringWrapper wrapper,
                                           int timesToRepeat)
    {
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

        for (int i = 0; i < timesToRepeat; i++)
        {
            builder.Append(wrapper.Value);
        }

        return new StringWrapper(builder.ToString());
    }
}

Then call it like...

var helloTimesThree = new StringWrapper("hello") * 3;

And get the value from...

helloTimesThree.Value;

Of course, the sane thing to do would be to have your function track and pass in the current depth and dump tabs out in a for loop based off of that.

Answer 12

if u need string 3 times just do

string x = "hello";

string combined = x + x + x;