Question

This question is along the lines of HTML table horizontal spacing

We have an old code base and can not use css. When an entire column in a table is empty, the resulting table is very ugly. We have a text email solution that adds spaces to the end up a word up to the remaining set of characters that you specify using New String. Since New String only takes a char, was seeing what 1 liner, small amount of code examples people could come up with.

We use .net 3.5sp1

Public Function StringSize(ByVal data As String, ByVal size As Short, ByVal usehtml As Boolean) As String
    If data.Length > size Then
        Return Left(data, size - 4) & "... "
    Else
        If usehtml Then
            'small algorithm here ( & nbsp ; )
        Else
            Return data & New String(" ", size - Len(data))
        End If
    End If
End Function

Answer 1

If you really want to pad with  , then – well, frankly – I’m not sure it is a great idea, but something like (excuse the C#):

int count = size - data.Length;
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(
    data, data.Length + (6 * count));
for(int i = 0 ; i < count ; i++) {
    sb.Append("&nbsp;");
}
string s = sb.ToString();

The following is a bad way to do it in one line with LINQ; included only for interest:

string s = data + string.Concat(Enumerable.Repeat(" ", size - data.Length).ToArray());