Difference between .ToString and "as string" in C#

Question

What is the difference between using the two following statements? It appears to me that the first "as string" is a type cast, while the second ToString is an actual call to a method that converts the input to a string? Just looking for some insight if any.

Page.Theme = Session["SessionTheme"] as string;
Page.Theme = Session["SessionTheme"].ToString();

Answer 1

if Session["SessionTheme"] is not a string, "as string" will return null.

.ToString() will try to convert any other type to string by calling the object's .ToString() method. For most built-in types this will return the object converted to a string, but for custom types without a specific .ToString() method, it will return the name of the type of the object.

object o1 = "somestring";
object o2 = 1;

string s = o1 as string; // returns "somestring"
string s = o2 as string; // returns null
string s = o2.ToString(); // returns "1"

Another important thing to keep in mind is that if the object is null, calling .ToString() will throw an exception, but "as string" will simply return null.

Answer 2

The as string check is the object is a string. If it isn't a null it returned.

The call to ToString() will indeed call the ToString() method on the object.

Answer 3

Page.Theme = Session["SessionTheme"] as string;

tries to cast to a string

whereas

Page.Theme = Session["SessionTheme"].ToString;

calls the tostring method, which can be anything really. This method doesnt cast, it should return a string representation of this object.

Answer 4

The first one returns the class as a string if the class is a string or derived from a string (returns null if unsuccessful).

The second invokes the ToString() method on the class.

Answer 5

The as keyword will basically check whether the object is an instance of the type, using MSIL opcode isinst under the hood. If it is, it returns the reference to the object, else a null reference.

It does not, as many say, attempt to perform a cast as such - which implies some kind of exception handling. Not so.

ToString(), simply calls the object's ToString() method, either a custom one implemented by the class (which for most in-built types performs a conversion to string) - or if none provided, the base class object's one, returning type info.

Answer 6

Actually the best way of writing the code above is to do the following:

if (Session["SessionTheme"] != null)
{
    Page.Theme = Session["SessionTheme"].ToString();
}

That way you're almost certain that it won't cast a NullReferenceException.

Answer 7

First of all "any-object as string" and "any-object.ToString()" are completely different things in terms of their respective context.

string str = any-object as string;

1) This will cast any-object as string type and if any-object is not castable to string then this statement will return null without throwing any exception.
2) This is a compiler-service.
3) This works pretty much well for any other type other than string, ex: you can do it as any-object as Employee, where Employee is a class defined in your library.

string str = any-object.ToString();  

1) This will call ToString() of any-object from type-defination. Since System.Object defines ToString() method any class in .Net framework has ToString() method available for over-riding. The programmer will over-ride the ToString() in any-object class or struct defination and will write the code that return suitable string representation of any-object according to responsibility and role played by any-object.
2) Like you can define a class Employee and over-ride ToString() method which may return Employee object's string representation as "FIRSTNAME - LASTNAME, EMP-CDOE" .

Note that the programmer has control over ToString() in this case and it has got nothing to do with casting or type-conversion.