Question

Lot of questions has been already asked about the differences between string and string builder and most of the people suggest that string builder is faster than string. I am curious to know if string builder is too good so why string is there? Moreover, can some body give me an example where string will be more usefull than string builder?

Answer 1

It’s not a case of which is more useful…

A String is a String – one or more characters next to each other. If you want to change a string in someway, it will simply create more strings because they are immutable.

A StringBuilder is a class which creates strings. It provides a means of constructing them without creating lots of reduntant strings in memory. The end result will always be a String.

Don’t do this

string s = "my string";
s += " is now a little longer";

or

s = s + " is now longer again";

That would create 5 strings in memory (in reality, see below).

Do this:

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
sb.Append("my string");
sb.Append(" is now a little longer");
sb.Append(" is now longer again");
string s = sb.ToString();

That would create 1 string in memory (again, see below).

You can do this:

string s = "It is now " + DateTime.Now + ".";

This only creates 1 string in memory.

As a side-note, creating a StringBuilder does take a certain amount of memory anyway. As a rough rule of thumb:

• Always use a StringBuilder if you’re concatenating strings in a loop.
• Use a StringBuilder if you’re concatenating a string more than 4 times.