Join a string using delimiters

Question

It's impossible to give a truly language-agnostic answer here as different languages and platforms handle strings differently, and provide different levels of built-in support for joining lists of strings. You could take pretty much identical code in two different languages, and it would be great in one and awful in another.

In C#, you could use:

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
string delimiter = "";
foreach (string item in list)
{
    builder.Append(delimiter);
    builder.Append(item);
    delimiter = ",";       
}
return builder.ToString();

This will prepend a comma on all but the first item. Similar code would be good in Java too.

EDIT: Here's an alternative, a bit like Ian's later answer but working on a general IEnumerable<string>.

// Change to IEnumerator for the non-generic IEnumerable
using (IEnumerator<string> iterator = list.GetEnumerator())
{
    if (!iterator.MoveNext())
    {
        return "";
    }
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(iterator.Current);
    while (iterator.MoveNext())
    {
        builder.Append(delimiter);
        builder.Append(iterator.Current);
    }
    return builder.ToString();
}

EDIT nearly 5 years after the original answer...

In .NET 4, string.Join was overloaded pretty significantly. There's an overload taking IEnumerable<T> which automatically calls ToString, and there's an overload for IEnumerable<string>. So you don't need the code above any more... for .NET, anyway.

In .NET, you can use the String.Join method:

string concatenated = String.Join(",", list.ToArray());

Using .NET Reflector, we can find out how it does it:

public static unsafe string Join(string separator, string[] value, int startIndex, int count)
{
    if (separator == null)
    {
        separator = Empty;
    }
    if (value == null)
    {
        throw new ArgumentNullException("value");
    }
    if (startIndex < 0)
    {
        throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("startIndex", Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentOutOfRange_StartIndex"));
    }
    if (count < 0)
    {
        throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("count", Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentOutOfRange_NegativeCount"));
    }
    if (startIndex > (value.Length - count))
    {
        throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("startIndex", Environment.GetResourceString("ArgumentOutOfRange_IndexCountBuffer"));
    }
    if (count == 0)
    {
        return Empty;
    }
    int length = 0;
    int num2 = (startIndex + count) - 1;
    for (int i = startIndex; i <= num2; i++)
    {
        if (value[i] != null)
        {
            length += value[i].Length;
        }
    }
    length += (count - 1) * separator.Length;
    if ((length < 0) || ((length + 1) < 0))
    {
        throw new OutOfMemoryException();
    }
    if (length == 0)
    {
        return Empty;
    }
    string str = FastAllocateString(length);
    fixed (char* chRef = &str.m_firstChar)
    {
        UnSafeCharBuffer buffer = new UnSafeCharBuffer(chRef, length);
        buffer.AppendString(value[startIndex]);
        for (int j = startIndex + 1; j <= num2; j++)
        {
            buffer.AppendString(separator);
            buffer.AppendString(value[j]);
        }
    }
    return str;
}

There's little reason to make it language-agnostic when some languages provide support for this in one line, e.g., Python's

",".join(sequence)

See the join documentation for more info.

For python be sure you have a list of strings, else ','.join(x) will fail. For a safe method using 2.5+

delimiter = '","'
delimiter.join(str(a) if a else '' for a in list_object)

The "str(a) if a else ''" is good for None types otherwise str() ends up making then 'None' which isn't nice ;)

In PHP's implode():

$string = implode($delim, $array);