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Accepted
D. Albarracín
Asked: 2020-09-26 06:11:51 +0800 CST 2020-09-26 06:11:51 +0800 CST

Maximum capacity of String in C#

  • 772

!Good!

I have a simple piece of code that I can't understand very well what is happening...

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string cadena = "lore";

        for(int i=0; i<1000000; i++)
        {
            cadena += "lore";
        }
        Console.WriteLine(cadena);
    }

What it does is easy to figure out. Simply chain the word in the variable a million times and then it should display it on the console.lorecadena

I highlight the should because it doesn't. And this is what I don't understand, why doesn't it show the result, and keep the program running? And how can I make it show it?

I have tried to give it a spin... And the logic that I find is that it exceeds the limit of characters that a can have string, but since no type of exception is thrown, it makes me doubt.

Any idea why this happens, and how to fix it?

c#

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I suspect that the problem is not the maximum size allowed stringin .net (theoretically 2,147,483,647 characters, the max. size of Int32, although this is not entirely true), but a property of strings.net and other languages: they are immutable.

    On each iteration of your loop a new string is being created in memory, and this is making it extremely slow.

    To do what you ask, you must use StringBuilder, which represents a mutable string . Look at this example:

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
{
     sb.Append("lore");
}
Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());

    By using StringBuilderyou are not creating a stringon every interaction, and it will work as you expect.

    • 6