Question

I have a method that accepts a bunch of strings in seperate parameters

public string GetQueryString(string string1, string string2, string string3...) 

It should return a string in the form of

'string1:value1 string2:value2 string3:value3...' 

Because I don’t want to put reflection logic in the callers of GetQueryString, I think working with string[,] parameters is not an option.

What I need now is a way to walk through all my parameters and add ‘parName:parValue‘ to my StringBuilder.
Currently I do this by checking each of them with an if clause

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(string1))     sb.AppendFormat('{0}:{1}', 'string1', string1); 

How can this be improved?

–CLARIFICATION–
What I believe the OP wants to do is something like this:

string str1 = 'Hello'; string s2 = 'World'; string MyStr = 'Greetings'; string YourStr = 'Earthlings'; string query = GetQueryString(str1, s2, MyStr, YourStr); 

and have it return 'str1:Hello s2:World MyStr:Greetings YourStr:Earthlings'

–EDIT–
clarification is correct.
Furthermore, because my method is called GetQueryString doesn’t mean I’m working on an HTML query string.. In this particular case it is actually a Lucene query string. But it could be any search function that can parse strings to a query..

Answer 1

The problem is, as soon as you compile this, the variable names will go away. Reflection won’t even help you.

The only thing I can think of that may work, is to use a expression tree (.NET v3.5+)

 string GetQueryString(Expression<Func<String, string>> exprTree )  {       // walk expreTree.        // exprTree.Body.Left.Name would be the name of the variable      // exprTree.Body.Left.Value would be it value.  }   string q = GetQueryString((str1, s2, MyS, YourS) => str1 + s2 + MyS + YourS);