StringBuilder.Append Vs StringBuilder.AppendFormat

Question

I was wondering about StringBuilder and I\'ve got a question that I was hoping the community would be able to explain.

Let\'s just forget about code readability, which o

Answer 1

casperOne is entirely accurate that it depends on the data. However, suppose you're writing this as a class library for 3rd parties to consume - which would you use?

One option would be to get the best of both worlds - work out how much data you're actually going to have to append, and then use StringBuilder.EnsureCapacity to make sure we only need a single buffer resize.

If I weren't too bothered though, I'd use Append x3 - it seems "more likely" to be faster, as parsing the string format tokens on every call is clearly make-work.

Note that I've asked the BCL team for a sort of "cached formatter" which we could create using a format string and then re-use repeatedly. It's crazy that the framework has to parse the format string each time it's used.

EDIT: Okay, I've edited John's code somewhat for flexibility and added an "AppendWithCapacity" which just works out the necessary capacity first. Here are the results for the different lengths - for length 1 I used 1,000,000 iterations; for all other lengths I used 100,000. (This was just to get sensible running times.) All times are in millis.

Unfortunately tables don't really work in SO. The lengths were 1, 1000, 10000, 20000

Times:

• Append: 162, 475, 7997, 17970
• AppendFormat: 392, 499, 8541, 18993
• AppendWithCapacity: 139, 189, 1558, 3085

So as it happened, I never saw AppendFormat beat Append - but I did see AppendWithCapacity win by a very substantial margin.

Here's the full code:

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Text;

public class StringBuilderTest
{            
    static void Append(string string1, string string2)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.Append(string1);
        sb.Append("----");
        sb.Append(string2);
    }

    static void AppendWithCapacity(string string1, string string2)
    {
        int capacity = string1.Length + string2.Length + 4;
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(capacity);
        sb.Append(string1);
        sb.Append("----");
        sb.Append(string2);
    }

    static void AppendFormat(string string1, string string2)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        sb.AppendFormat("{0}----{1}", string1, string2);
    }

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        int size = int.Parse(args[0]);
        int iterations = int.Parse(args[1]);
        string method = args[2];

        Action action;
        switch (method)
        {
            case "Append": action = Append; break;
            case "AppendWithCapacity": action = AppendWithCapacity; break;
            case "AppendFormat": action = AppendFormat; break;
            default: throw new ArgumentException();
        }

        string string1 = new string('x', size);
        string string2 = new string('y', size);

        // Make sure it's JITted
        action(string1, string2);
        GC.Collect();

        Stopwatch sw = Stopwatch.StartNew();
        for (int i=0; i < iterations; i++)
        {
            action(string1, string2);
        }
        sw.Stop();
        Console.WriteLine("Time: {0}ms", (int) sw.ElapsedMilliseconds);
    }
}