Strings in .NET and C#

Interning

.NET has the concept of an "intern pool". It's basically just a set of strings, but it makes sure that every time you reference the same string literal, you get a reference to the same string. This is probably language-dependent, but it's certainly true in C# and VB.NET, and I'd be very surprised to see a language it didn't hold for, as IL makes it very easy to do (probably easier than failing to intern literals). As well as literals being automatically interned, you can intern strings manually with the Intern method, and check whether or not there is already an interned string with the same character sequence in the pool using the IsInterned method. This somewhat unintuitively returns a string rather than a boolean - if an equal string is in the pool, a reference to that string is returned. Otherwise, null is returned. Likewise, the Intern method returns a reference to an interned string - either the string you passed in if was already in the pool, or a newly created interned string, or an equal string which was already in the pool.

Literals

Literals are how you hard-code strings into C# programs. There are two types of string literals in C# - regular string literals and verbatim string literals. Regular string literals are similar to those in many other languages such as Java and C - they start and end with ", and various characters (in particular, " itself, \, and carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF)) need to be "escaped" to be represented in the string. Verbatim string literals allow pretty much anything within them, and end at the first " which isn't doubled. Even carriage returns and line feeds can appear in the literal! To obtain a " within the string itself, you need to write "". Verbatim string literals are distinguished by having an @ before the opening quote. Here are some examples of the two types of literal, and what they amount to:

For other escape sequences, please see the relevant FAQ entry. Note that the difference is only for the compiler's sake. Once the string is in the compiled code, there's no such thing as a verbatim string literal vs a regular string literal.

Strings and the debugger

Numerous people run into problems when inspecting strings in the debugger, both with VS.NET 2002 and VS.NET 2003. Ironically, the problems are often generated by the debugger trying to be helpful, and either displaying the string as a regular string literal with backslash-escaped characters in, or displaying it as a verbatim string literal complete with leading @. This leads to many questions asking how the @ can be removed, despite the fact that it's not really there in the first place - it's only how the debugger's showing it. Also, some versions of VS.NET will stop displaying the contents of the string at the first null character, and evaluate its Length property incorrectly, calculating the value itself instead of asking the managed code. Again, it then considers the string to finish at the first null character.

Given the confusion this has caused, I believe it's best to examine strings in a different way when debugging, at least if you think something odd is going on. I suggest using a method like the one below, which will print the contents of a string to the console in a safe way. Depending on what kind of application you're developing, you may want to write this information to a log file, to the debug or trace listeners, or pop it up in a message box.