Question

I’d like to have a method that transforms the first character of a string into lower case.

My approaches:

1.

public static string ReplaceFirstCharacterToLowerVariant(string name)
{
    return String.Format("{0}{1}", name.First().ToString().ToLowerInvariant(), name.Substring(1));
}

2.

public static IEnumerable<char> FirstLetterToLowerCase(string value)
{
    var firstChar = (byte)value.First();
    return string.Format("{0}{1}", (char)(firstChar + 32), value.Substring(1));
}

What would be your approach?

Answer 1

I would use simple concatenation:

Char.ToLowerInvariant(name[0]) + name.Substring(1)

The first solution is not optimized because string.Format is slow and you don’t need it if you have a format that will never change. It also generates an extra string to covert the letter to lowercase, which is not needed.

The approach with “+ 32” is ugly / not maintainable as it requires knowledge of ASCII character value offsets. It will also generate incorrect output with Unicode data and ASCII symbol characters.