Question

I have a class called user that contains a list of groups that are strings ( Group A, Group B, Group C)

public class User
    {

        public string FirstName { get; set; }
        public string LastName { get; set; }

        public User()
        {
            Groups = new List<string>();
        }

    }

I am then using a json deserializer to create the list of users and groups. However I would like to be able to get a string of the groups with this format for each user:

“Group A”, “Group B”, “Group C”

I have tried this:

string[] AllGroups;
AllGroups = (string[])usrList[0].Groups.ToArray();
return string.Join(",", AllGroups);

However it is giving me a list in this format (with no quotes):

Group A, Group B, Group C

Any idea what I am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Any idea what I am doing wrong here?

Well you’re not adding the quotes anywhere – so you’re not getting them.

You can surround each item with quotes yourself easily enough:

return string.Join(", ", usrList[0].Groups.Select(x => "\"" + x + "\""));

That’s assuming you’re using .NET 4 or higher – if you’re using .NET 3.5 (which doesn’t have quite as good string.Join support) you need to create an array, but you don’t need to cast it to string[] (as ToArray already returns an array)…

return string.Join(", ", usrList[0].Groups
                                   .Select(x => "\"" + x + "\"")
                                   .ToArray());

I’ve added a space after the comma delimiter as well, given your question – I suspect your current code is really giving you Group A,Group B,Group C.