{"id":169,"date":"2007-02-12T22:29:20","date_gmt":"2007-02-13T05:29:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameskovacs.com\/2007\/02\/13\/MultiLine+Strings+In+C"},"modified":"2007-02-12T22:29:20","modified_gmt":"2007-02-13T05:29:20","slug":"multiline-strings-in-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/2007\/02\/12\/multiline-strings-in-c\/","title":{"rendered":"Multi-Line Strings in C#"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know C# quite well and thought I knew all the language features, both old, new, and forthcoming. Today I was completely surprised when I discovered a feature that has existed since C# 1.0 that I never knew about… String literals in C# can span multiple source lines!<\/p>\n

My voyage to discovery started when reading a post<\/a> by Oren Eini<\/a> about an unrelated subject. He casually mentioned his annoyance that Microsoft used string concatenation in its examples and why weren’t they using multi-line strings. Oren is a smart guy and generally knows what he’s talking about. So I started poking around. The following code results in a compiler error, as I expected:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
string<\/span> sql = \"SELECT foo<\/SPAN><\/PRE>
              FROM bar<\/PRE>
              WHERE baz=42\";<\/span><\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
<\/font><\/p>\n
So regular strings cannot span multiple lines, which is why you commonly see it written as:<\/p>\n
string<\/span> sql = \"SELECT foo \"<\/span> + <\/pre>\n
             \"FROM bar \"<\/span> +<\/pre>\n
             \"WHERE baz=42\"<\/span>;<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n
I can wax poetic all day about the advantages\/disadvantages of hard-coded SQL in your code. The reality is that if you’re not using an object-relational mapper (such as NHibernate<\/a> – and you really should be), you need to stick the SQL somewhere. Code is as good a place as any. The truly awful part is round-tripping the SQL between a query editor and C# for tuning or investigation purposes because you have to strip out all those double-quotes and plus signs. But C# has another type of string — the string literal (@””). As it turns out, string literals can span multiple lines. The following is completely valid C# and even provides decent readability of the SQL in your C# code:<\/p>\n
\n
string<\/span> sql = @\"SELECT foo<\/SPAN><\/PRE>
               FROM bar<\/SPAN><\/PRE>
               WHERE baz=42\"<\/span>;<\/pre>\n<\/div>\n
Maybe LINQ (in .NET 3.5) will do away with the need for SQL in quoted strings, but until that day, my SQL statements became a little bit more wieldy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I know C# quite well and thought I knew all the language features, both old, new, and forthcoming. Today I was completely surprised when I discovered a feature that has existed since C# 1.0 that I never knew about… String literals in C# can span multiple source lines! My voyage to discovery started when reading […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dotnetgeneral"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jameskovacs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}