Comments on: Multi-Line Strings in C#

By: James

James — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:46:27 +0000

Speaking from personal experience, I often use string literals (@”") for file paths, which on Windows use backslash characters. So using the same escape sequence in both cases would remove one of the most useful features of string literals.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:33:59 +0000

What is with MS? Why is the escape sequence in c# \” for a quote EXCEPT in lines declared with a @ ? In this case the escape sequence is “”.

bah

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 12:58:13 +0000

Thans, This was exactly what I was after!

By: Ash

Ash — Wed, 11 May 2011 03:54:25 +0000

James,

Forget about all the nitpickers. I write a lot of stored procedures as well as in-line code using long SQL statements. I keep my SQL statements always readable. You have no idea, how thankful I am for a small but NEAT idea of keeping my in-line SQL statements sane!!!

Thank you!

By: Stan

Stan — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:06:11 +0000

To further improve readability, you can also do it like this (and avoid all the whitespaces from indenting the text):

string sql = “” +
@”SELECT foo
FROM bar
WHERE baz=42″;

By: James

James — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:02:09 +0000

@abhinav – You are correct that there is no perf hit using “+” as long as all strings are known at compile-time. Using @ will result in some bloat to your strings with the extra whitespace and new lines, but you would have to be dealing in some pretty extreme performance circumstances for this to matter. Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Write more maintainable code and then optimize the parts that a profiler tells you are actually slow, not the parts that you guess are slow. As developers, we almost always guess incorrectly.

By: Abhinav

Abhinav — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:09:37 +0000

Using “@” is not necessarily good, since it increases the target string size. This could be an issue if your intention to span your string is only to increase its readability.

Using “+” not necessarily has Performance hit, it depends on how you use it. In the case of the following statement:

string sql = “SELECT foo ” +
“FROM bar ” +
“WHERE baz=42″;

The COMPILER is smart enough to convert it in to one string at COMPILATION time, so there is not Performance hit of using “+” at RUNTIME.
Don’t believe me??, I thought so, so in order to confirm open the IL code of the generated code Assembly and you’ll find that there is only ONE string. If you don’t know how to read IL code, Use Reflector to see the IL code in C# to prove my point.

The Output IL:
ldstr “SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE baz=42″

Take Away from story:
> Use + to span your strings in multiple lines for improving readability.
> Use @ if your string has line breaks in it

Hope it helps!!
Abhinav

By: Yangxin

Yangxin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:55:20 +0000

Yes, using "+" has performance hit. StringBuffer is not quite intuitive. @ is good.

By: Hai Vu

Hai Vu — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:09:30 +0000

I have come to love the @" … " string when I worked on path names and regular expression. Now the multi-line feature makes me like it even more. By the way, your post comes up first when I google search for the phrase "c# string span several lines".

By: vijay

vijay — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 16:44:13 +0000

By the way, you can also include double quotes as part of the string in the above mentioned method by providing 2 consecutive double quotes.

Example:

string myMultiLineString = @"This line also contains ""double quotes"",
and also can continue to
multiple lines";