Smart string builder – InternetException

In this rare times when I was writing code that suppose to create large string from smaller chunks and with some non string parameters I was using StringBuilder class of course. Of course because string adding, or string concatenation is very costly when talking about memory utilization. It is because every time you do this:

var text = "Hello world!"+ "n"+ "How are you?";

new string is created for every ‘+’ operation in memory. Not a best way of doing strings creations. StringBuilder is better because it do not creates strings until you call .ToString method of StringBuilder class.

So instead of doing something like was shown above code should look something like follows:

var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
stringBuilder.Append("Hello world!");
stringBuilder.Append("n");
stringBuilder.Append("How are you?");
Console.WriteLine(stringBuilder);

This is better but while writing this code I disliked of how much you have to type to just add another string to string builder object. I thought: can this be done better? In fact it can. And this is way I created SmartStringBuilder class.

Requirement was to have something like this:

var smartBuilder = new SmartStringBuilder();
smartBuilder += "Hello World!";
smartBuilder += "n";
smartBuilder += "How are you?";
Console.WriteLine(smartBuilder);

Luckily C# alows to write custom behaviors for operators like ‘+’. To do this we can use special operator keyword in C#. For managing chunks of strings we will use private instance of StringBuilder class:

public class SmartStringBuilder
{
    private StringBuilder internalStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

    public SmartStringBuilder() { }

    public SmartStringBuilder(string str)
    {
        internalStringBuilder.Append(str);
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return internalStringBuilder.ToString();
    }

    public static SmartStringBuilder operator +(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder, string addString)
    {
        smartBuilder.internalStringBuilder.Append(addString);
        return smartBuilder;
    }
}

This allows us to execute first 3 lines of ‘requirements code’

var smartBuilder = new SmartStringBuilder();
smartBuilder += "Hello World!";
smartBuilder += "n";
smartBuilder += "How are you?";

To allows using our new class us string in Console.WriteLine method (or any other method that takes string parameter) we need to add implicit casting operator to string type:

public static implicit operator string(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder)
{
   return smartBuilder.ToString();
}

With our class defined like this we can execute following line:

Console.WriteLine(smartBuilder);

Another nice feature is possibility of adding values of other types to our builder with + sign. We can do this by adding + operator to our class for each of them. For example for int type this method would look like this:

public static SmartStringBuilder operator +(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder, int number)
{
    smartBuilder.internalStringBuilder.Append(number);
    return smartBuilder;
}

This allows us to execute following line safely:

smartBuilder += 1;

Ideally would be to add possibility of formatting values of other types with format strings i.e.:

smartBuilder += ("format {0}", 1);

But this is impossible without changing C# language itslelf. Best thing we can do is to add AppendFormat method that executes method with the same name in internal StringBuilder object.

public void AppendFormat(string format, params object[] parameters)
{
     internalStringBuilder.AppendFormat(format, parameters);
}

Our whole class will look like this:

public class SmartStringBuilder
{

    private StringBuilder internalStringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

    public SmartStringBuilder() { }

    public SmartStringBuilder(string str)
    {
        internalStringBuilder.Append(str);
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return internalStringBuilder.ToString();
    }

    public static implicit operator string(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder)
    {
        return smartBuilder.ToString();
    }

    public static SmartStringBuilder operator +(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder, string addString)
    {
        smartBuilder.internalStringBuilder.Append(addString);
        return smartBuilder;
    }

    public static SmartStringBuilder operator +(SmartStringBuilder smartBuilder, int number)
    {
        smartBuilder.internalStringBuilder.Append(number);
        return smartBuilder;
    }

    public void AppendFormat(string format, params object[] parameters)
    {
        internalStringBuilder.AppendFormat(format, parameters);
    }
}

That is it. Not much of magic but it simplifies string manipulation a little 🙂

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