StringBuilder - Quick Look for Beginner C# Programmers

thanks for checking out this video we're going to have an introductory look at string Builders and C sharp so if you're relatively new to C sharp and working with strings and you haven't even heard about string Builders or maybe you have and you're not really sure when and why you should use them this video is for you I won't bore you too much with an intro so let's jump right over to the code and see how these things work so I have a new project here in visual studio and what I'm gonna be demonstrating is why we would want to use a string Builder so let's start out with a simple example and we're going to Define our string here so I'm just going to declare a new string variable we'll call it my string and we'll just initialize it to be empty all right so you may have some code and depending on what you're trying to build where you're trying to add a bunch of stuff to this string so for example you want to be looping through things and adding more content to the string and you might have a loop structure where you might say while true and you're trying to do some type of work and you want to be basically doing something like my string Plus equals and then you're putting in some other text here right so this kind of thing going on obviously this this example code please don't go around this this will just be an infinite Loop but you know this General structure where you have a loop you're trying to concatenate the string um and just basically adding more content to it so some examples of this kind of stuff might be if you're trying to build up an HTML document or maybe you're trying to format some Json or some XML and you find that you're adding a bunch of strings together it may not look exactly like some type of loop structure it might look like you have some other strings so maybe you have um string my big string one and this is going to be assigned to something that is very large so let's just pretend this goes on for um you know thank you autocomplete thousands of characters um so this string is really big and you might have another string that's really big so we have a second one here and you might go well cool I want my string to be equal to these two things and depending on what your application's doing if you have something really simple this might be totally okay the reason that I want to talk about this is when you should be looking at using a string Builder now a string Builder let's declare one of those so string Builder my string Builder cool so we have a new one of these and what you're able to do is basically build up the strings it might suggest and then we can get the output of that so we can say my string is going to be equal to my string Builder tostring where I have this comment rate here is actually where we would be putting in the other pieces to this string Builder and then calling to string on it so to replace this example that I have highlighted it might look something like my string Builder dot append this autocomplete is using copilot now and it's getting a little bit too crazy for my liking so I probably should have disabled it but please bear with me so this is functionally equivalent to what's on line eight here the difference is that when we're doing this kind of thing and adding the strings together this might not be a good example you might want to consider like adding more things to it essentially what's happening is that there's a lot of string copying going on there's a lot of allocations when you have to concatenate strings together the string Builder class is basically behind the scenes going to do this a lot more effectively for you so instead of having lots of little allocations along the way you end up getting one string created right at the end when you do this to string call so this particular example may not be a great way to demonstrate it the loop example or thinking about building up you know some large XML file some Json file something that's going to have a lot of text in it and you have to keep appending small pieces to it something like a string Builder is going to be very beneficial for you and you'll notice that not only you're going to have less allocations you'll probably notice the performance of your application increases this will depend if you find like you have a really simple application maybe you're jamming two big strings together and whatever you don't care about performance just because it's so simple you know this kind of thing on line eight that might be totally fine for you so when I talk about these types of things I don't want to tell you like it's a rule that if you have have you know two or more strings over X length you must use a string Builder no like you don't have to if you have a really simple app do what you got to do but I I wanted to demonstrate to you that if you're using a string Builder and you are putting long strings together and appending them then doing something like this will be more effective than what you see on line eight so as you're building more complex applications and trying to get a little bit more performance out of them I do recommend that you start considering when you have scenarios like this that you're looking at a string Builder maybe to replace that so just a super short video to touch on why you might want to use string Builders again just to quickly recap when you're putting a lot of strings together and appending them whether it's small pieces one at a time or you're putting a bunch of big strings together to try and make something even bigger perhaps like a document XML HTML Json something like that you may have a lot of allocations you're going to be probably experiencing a bit of slowdown depending on what you're doing and if you compare that with a string Builder it will be able to do that a lot more effectively for you so just something to keep in mind and keep that in your toolbox as you're programming thanks for watching and if you enjoyed this video then 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