Question

Is there a way to format an integer as the equivalent ASCII/Unicode character in C#? For example, if I have the following code:

int n = 65;
string format = ""; // what?

string s = string.Format(format, n);

what do I need to put in the string format to result a single character, ‘A’, being written to s – basically I’m looking for the equivalent of doing the following in C:

int n = 65;
char s[2];
char format = "%c";

sprintf(s, format, n); /* s <- 'A' */

EDIT

I should probably explain a bit more about what I’m trying to do, as the obvious answer “cast it to char”, doesn’t help.

I have a situation where I have an integer value that represents a bank account check digit, but which needs to be output as a character for some countries and a (0-padded) digit string for others. I’m wondering if there’s a way of switching between the two just by changing the format string, so I can hold a dictionary of the appropriate format strings, keyed on the country code.

EDIT 2

(For Oded) something like this …

IDictionary<string, string> ccFormat = new Dictionary<string, string>()
{
  { "GB", "{0:D}" },  // 0-9
  { "PT", "{0:D2}" }, // 00-99
  { "US", "{0:D3}" }, // 000-999
  { "IT", ???? }      // A-Z -- What should ???? be?
};


string FormatCheckDigits(int digits, string country)
{
  return string.Format(ccFormat[country], digits);
}

Currently I’ve got ???? as null and some special case code in the method:

string FormatCheckDigits(int digits, string country)
{
  string format = ccFormat[country];

  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(format)) 
  {
    // special case: format as A-Z
    return ((char) digits).ToString();
  }
  else 
  {
    // Use retrieved format string
    return string.Format(format, digits);
  }
}

Answer 1

You can cast the int to a char:

string s = ((char)n).ToString();

---

There is no way to tell string.Format to format an integer as a character. There are not custom or standard numeric format strings that will help with this.

Your current solution is simple and works, so you should keep it, unless you are starting to get into more involved options. If that happens, you may need to introduce an abstraction that will return the correct representation for country (say a CountryCheckDigitFormatter that will hold the country and a custom ToString method per country).