Declaring a looooong single line string in C#

Question

Is there a decent way to declare a long single line string in C#, such that it isn\'t impossible to declare and/or view the string in an editor?

The options I\'m aware o

Answer 1

Use the Project / Properties / Settings from the top menu of Visual Studio. Make the scope = "Application".

In the Value box you can enter very long strings and as a bonus line feeds are preserved. Then your code can refer to that string like this:

string sql = Properties.Settings.Default.xxxxxxxxxxxxx;

Answer 2

If you really want this long string in the code, and you really don't want to type the end-quote-plus-begin-quote, then you can try something like this.

string longString = @"Some long string, 
    with multiple whitespace characters 
    (including newlines and carriage returns)
    converted to a single space
    by a regular expression replace.";

longString = Regex.Replace(longString, @"\s+", " ");

Answer 3

It depends on how the string is going to wind up being used. All the answers here are valid, but context is important. If long string "s" is going to be logged, it should be surrounded with a logging guard test, such as this Log4net example:

if (log.IsDebug) {
    string s = "blah blah blah" + 
    // whatever concatenation you think looks the best can be used here,
    // since it's guarded...
}

If the long string s is going to be displayed to a user, then Developer Art's answer is the best choice...those should be in resource file.

For other uses (generating SQL query strings, writing to files [but consider resources again for these], etc...), where you are concatenating more than just literals, consider StringBuilder as Wael Dalloul suggests, especially if your string might possibly wind up in a function that just may, at some date in the distant future, be called many many times in a time-critical application (All those invocations add up). I do this, for example, when building a SQL query where I have parameters that are variables.

Other than that, no, I don't know of anything that both looks pretty and is easy to type (though the word wrap suggestion is a nice idea, it may not translate well to diff tools, code print outs, or code review tools). Those are the breaks. (I personally use the plus-sign approach to make the line-wraps neat for our print outs and code reviews).

Answer 4

Personally I would read a string that big from a file perhaps an XML document.

Answer 5

If using Visual Studio

Tools > Options > Text Editor > All Languages > Word Wrap

I'm sure any other text editor (including notepad) will be able to do this!

Answer 6

you can use StringBuilder like this:

StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
str.Append("this is my really long string.  this is my long string. ");
str.Append("this is my really long string.  this is my long string. ");
str.Append("this is my really long string.  this is my long string. ");
str.Append("this is my really long string.  this is my long string. ");
string s = str.ToString();

You can also use: Text files, resource file, Database and registry.