Question

I tried the following code in LINQPad and got the results given below:

List<string> listFromSplit = new List<string>('a, b'.Split(','.ToCharArray())).Dump(); listFromSplit.ForEach(delegate(string s)  {    s.Trim();  }); listFromSplit.Dump(); 

‘a’ and ‘ b’

so the letter b didn’t get the white-space removed as I was expecting…?

Anyone have any ideas

[NOTE: the .Dump() method is an extension menthod in LINQPad that prints out the contents of any object in a nice intelligently formatted way]

Answer 1

The String.Trim() method returns a string representing the updated string. It does not update the string object itself, but rather creates a new one.

You could do this:

s = s.Trim(); 

However you cannot update a collection while enumerating through it so you’d want to either fill a new List while enumerating over the existing one or populate the List manually using the string array returned by String.Split.

Filling a new list:

List<string> temp = new List<string>('a, b'.Split(','.ToCharArray())); List<string> listFromSplit = new List<string>();  temp.ForEach(delegate(string s)  {      listFromSplit.Add(s.Trim());  });  listFromSplit.Dump(); 

Populating Manually:

string[] temp = 'a, b'.Split(','.ToCharArray()); List<string> listFromSplit = new List<string>();  foreach (string s in temp) {     listFromSplit.Add(s.Trim());  };  listFromSplit.Dump();