C# 6 Features – String Interpolation

For this post in my series, I want to look at one of my favorite little time savers, String Interpolation. String Interpolation is basically when you put tokens into a string and those are replaced for you by the language. Previously, in C#, we might do one of the following things:

// Concatenation
var name = "Pete";
var greeting = "Hello, " + name;

// String Format
var name = "Pete";
var greeting = string.Format("Hello, {0}", name);

Sometimes, with a long string with a lot of tokens, this can get kind of unwieldy. And, if you reuse tokens (say, a line break, or the person’s name), it can be almost impossible to keep things straight. Other languages have had features like this for awhile.

Swift:

var name = "Pete"
var greeting = "Hello, \(name)"

Ruby:

name = "Pete"
greeting = "Hello #{name}"

Now, in C# 6, we get that kind of clarity as well. The syntax calls for you to use a dollar sign ($) in front of the string and then use curly braces surrounding the variable reference in the string. Here is an example

New C# 6 String Interpolation:

var name = "Pete";
var greeting = $"Hello, {name}";

In my opinion, that beats the pants off of string.Format(). Additionally, you can also reference class properties by the same syntax. Here is another example:

var name = "Pete";
var greeting = $"Hello, {name}.  Your name has {name.Length} letters.";

You can also express values from methods:

var items = new []{"a", "b", "c"};
Console.WriteLine($"Items has {items.Count()} items");

So, there you go. I can promise you that I’m going to use this instead of string.Format() in every project that is running the necessary framework versions.