Adding spaces between strings

Question

Hi, What's the best way of adding spaces between strings

myString = string.Concat("a"," ","b")

or

myString = string.Concat("a",Chr(9),"b")

I am using stringbuilder to build an XML file and looking for something efficient.

Thanks

Edit ~ Language VB.NET

Answer 1

Create your XML file with the XmlDocument class. Your wasting your time creating a string from scratch.

Answer 2

String.Join is a static method that can take the separator (in this case, " ") and an array of strings.

string sentence = String.Join(" ", new string[] { "The", "quick", "brown", "fox" });

Answer 3

Definitely not Chr(9). Not everyone uses ascii, after all.

Answer 4

As an alternative to the "tranditional" XMLDocument , if you're using .NET 3.5 and up, take a look at the new XDocument / XElement classes in LINQ.

A good tutorial is here:

http://www.hookedonlinq.com/Print.aspx?Page=LINQtoXML5MinuteOverview

Answer 5

Isn't Chr(9) a tab, anyway?

Answer 6

Well, for a start, chr(9) is a tab character - you would want to use chr(32) to get a space.

That said, the first option, string.Concat("a"," ","b"), is a more readable one. I would be concentrating on getting your code functionally correct to start with. Optimization should always be a last step and targeted only to those areas that need it. In other words, you need a baseline to check your optimizations against.

Far too many times, you optimize then find yourself having to change the code anyway, meaning that your optimization effort was wasted.

Answer 7

The simplest way is to use an aggregate function to combine the elements.

string[] input = new string[]{"a", "b"};
var withSpaces = input.Aggregate( (x,y) => x + " " + );

Answer 8

I don't see where in the code example in the question there is a stringbuilder; but since you say you are using one; I would use:

sb.AppendFormat("{0} {1}", a, b);

Answer 9

If you're concatenating a known number of strings it's probably better to just use + as the compiler translates it into a call to string.Concat anyway. So

s = a + " " + b

becomes

s = string.Concat(a, " ", b)

But the first is a lot more readable. Though the usual caveat, StringBuilders are generally preferable when doing this in a loop.

Using Chr(32) over " " will make no difference speed wise as in this case Chr(x) is translated at compile time in VB.Net (don't know if it always is, but on my machine it did) so you're just making it more difficult to read with no benifit. Chr is mainly there for backwards compatibility and is generally best used for defining characters outside of the printable range.

That said, it's probably better to use one of the framework library to build XML unless it's a very small fragment.