Question

If the title isn’t accurate enough, please feel free to change it to something more well named.

So i have a public static void:

public static void outputDictionaryContents(Dictionary<string, int> list)
{
    foreach (KeyValuePair<string, int> pair in list)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("{0}, {1}", pair.Key, pair.Value);
    }
}

and I am wanting to write out what it produce on a html file, it will output it fine on command prompt via:

outputDictionaryContents(sortedDict);

but when it comes to outputting it in my html with the following code:

tw.WriteLine("<td width\"480\">{0}</td>", outputDictionaryContents(sortedDict));

but I keep getting the following error:

The best overloaded method match for 'System.IO.TextWriter.WriteLine(string, object)' has some invalid arguments
Argument '#2' cannon convert 'void' expression to type 'object'

So i’m not completely sure in what the best way is to fix this problem.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Your method doesn’t return a string – it writes to the console.

You could change it to return a string directly:

public static string GetDictionaryContents(Dictionary<string, int> list)
    {
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (KeyValuePair<string, int> pair in list)
        {
            builder.AppendFormat("{0}, {1}{2}", pair.Key, pair.Value, Environment.NewLine);
        }

        return builder.ToString();
    }

That being said, if you’re going to write this into an HTML output, you probably need to rethink what you want to write. Writing newline separated info directly into a table cell is not going to format correctly…

You are more likely going to, at a minimum, want some additional formatting, or provide a separate terminator (such as a <br /> instead of a newline)…