Alternatives to " " for creating strings containing multiple whitespace characters

Question

I'm wondering if there's a more OO way of creating spaces in C#.

Literally Space Code!

I currently have tabs += new String(" "); and I can't help but feel that this is somewhat reminiscent of using "" instead of String.Empty.

What can I use to create spaces that isn't " "?

Answer 1

You can write

" " 

instead of

new String(' ') 

Does that help?

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Depending on what you do, you might want to look into the StringBuilder.Append overload that accepts a character and a 'repeat' count:

var tabs = new StringBuilder(); tabs.Append(' ', 8); 

or into the string constructor that constructs a string from a character a 'repeat' count:

var tabs = new string(' ', 8); 

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Here's an enterprisey OO solution to satisfy all your space generation needs:

public abstract class SpaceFactory {     public static readonly SpaceFactory Space = new SpaceFactoryImpl();      public static readonly SpaceFactory ZeroWidth = new ZeroWidthFactoryImpl();      protected SpaceFactory { }      public abstract char GetSpace();      public virtual string GetSpaces(int count)     {         return new string(this.GetSpace(), count);     }      private class SpaceFactoryImpl : SpaceFactory     {         public override char GetSpace()         {             return '\u0020';         }     }      private class ZeroWidthFactoryImpl : SpaceFactory     {         public override char GetSpace()         {             return '\u200B';         }     } } 

Answer 2

Now that you've clarified in comments:

In my actual code I'm doing new String(' ',numberOfSpaces) so I probably need to still use the new String part.

... the other answers so far are effectively useless :(

You could write:

const char Space = ' '; 

then use

new string(Space, numberOfSpaces) 

but I don't see any benefit of that over

new string(' ', numberOfSpaces)