Alternatives to “ ” for creating strings containing multiple whitespace characters

Question

I\'m wondering if there\'s a more OO way of creating spaces in C#.

Literally Space Code!

I currently have tabs += new String(\" \"); and I can\'

Answer 1

You can write

" "

instead of

new String(' ')

Does that help?

---

Depending on what you do, you might want to look into the StringBuilder.Append overload that accepts a character and a 'repeat' count:

var tabs = new StringBuilder();
tabs.Append(' ', 8);

or into the string constructor that constructs a string from a character a 'repeat' count:

var tabs = new string(' ', 8);

---

Here's an enterprisey OO solution to satisfy all your space generation needs:

public abstract class SpaceFactory
{
    public static readonly SpaceFactory Space = new SpaceFactoryImpl();

    public static readonly SpaceFactory ZeroWidth = new ZeroWidthFactoryImpl();

    protected SpaceFactory { }

    public abstract char GetSpace();

    public virtual string GetSpaces(int count)
    {
        return new string(this.GetSpace(), count);
    }

    private class SpaceFactoryImpl : SpaceFactory
    {
        public override char GetSpace()
        {
            return '\u0020';
        }
    }

    private class ZeroWidthFactoryImpl : SpaceFactory
    {
        public override char GetSpace()
        {
            return '\u200B';
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

I think you are taking OO way to far.. A simple addition of a space does not need an entire class.

tabs += new String(' ');

or

tabs += " ";

is just fine.

Answer 3

if the number of spaces would be changing then you could do something like this:

public static string Space(int count)
{
    return "".PadLeft(count);
}

Space(2);

Answer 4

If the language allowed for it you could add an extension property to the type String which was Space, something like:

public static class StringExt
{
    public static char Space(this String s)
    {
        get {
            return ' ';
        }
    }
}

but that isn't possible. I think it would be better to keep the space inside the property if it was a localizable thingy, but I think spaces are universal across all languages.

Answer 5

You could use "\t", I think, to give you a tab character. That might make the spaceing more clear.

Answer 6

The more "OO" way would be to find a simpler way of solving your larger business problem. For example, the fact that you have a variable named tabs suggests to me that you are trying to roll your own column alignment code. String.Format supports that directly, e.g.

// Left-align name and status, right-align amount (formatted as currency).
writer.WriteLine("Name                 Status         Amount");
writer.WriteLine("-------------------- ---------- ----------");
foreach(var item in items) {
    writer.WriteLine(string.Format("{0,-20} {1,-10} {2,10:C}", item.Name, item.Status, item.Amount));
}