Question

I am trying to align values.
I wonder why this happen :

        string value = "";

        value += string.Format("{0,-10}", "value");
        value += string.Format("{0,5}", "value");

        value += Environment.NewLine;

        value += string.Format("{0,-8}", "val");
        value += string.Format("{0,7}", "value");

        MessageBox.Show(value);

If i check value before i do “MessageBox.Show() it is correct. The result is:

value     value
val       value

As they should be, but when i do MessageBox.show() then they get like this :

   value     value
   val     value

I really cant understand why it changes the string with show()? Same thing happens when i am trying to print “value”, then it doesnt align correct.

Btw: this is just a test code so you could understand the problem that i am having with the real code.

Answer 1

This might be caused by the fact that the font used in the message box is not monospaced, meaning that each character takes an equal amount of horizontal space. The font you are using in the Visual Studio debugger probably is, which is why the padding looks entirely different.

You could try if using tabs instead of spaces for your formatting gives better results.