Simple Way to Create Delimited String

December 21, 2014      .net Programming

A common, yet inefficient way to create a delimited string is to declare a string variable and continuously append delimiters and values to it. This is grossly inefficient since strings are immutable and new memory is allocated for each concatenation. This method also involves a lot of repetitive code that. Here is a much more efficient way:

public static void AppendToken(this StringBuilder sb, string Token, char Separator)
{
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(Token)) return;
 if (sb.Length > 0)
   sb.Append(Separator);
 sb.Append(Token);
}

StringBuilder sbExample = new StringBuilder();
sbExample.AppendToken("string 1", ' ');
sbExample.AppendToken("string 2", ' ');
sbExample.AppendToken("string 3", ' ');
Console.WriteLine(sbExample.ToString());

Output:

See, it's as easy as 123!