Question

I have a class that has 3 string properties. I want to store these in a list so that when I make changes to the strings of the list they also get updated in the class.

This would be easy to do if I was using class object, but string seems to behave differently. It seems to make a copy of the object for the list rather then have a pointer to the object. How am I supposed to do this is C#? If this is not possible is there a better way?

Answer 1

The problem with strings is that they are immutable. In other words, you can never change a string once it is created.

Thus, if you want to ‘change’ a string, you must remove the original from the List, and store the result back into the list. Example:

string a = "abcdefg";
List<String> list = new List<String>();
list.add(a);

a = a.Substring(0, 5);

That code does nothing because the string a is pointing to never changes. It just points to a new string.