Concatenating a long set of objects in a string with a separator

It still amazes me when I see people concatenating a long set of repetitive strings with a StringBuilder, adding a separator to each string it, and then remove the last separator – or doing some complex if-statement comparing a count or index to prevent a trailing separator or something.

This is a very simple trick I use a lot of times when I need, for instance, to change a list of points into it’s Well Known Text (WKT) representation. So let’s assume we have a variable points of IList<System.Windows.Point>, that I want to convert to a list of coordinates that fit in WKT string. That is: X and Y separated by a space, and coordinates separated by a comma. I can do that with this simple statement that would have been a one-liner if it had not been for lack of space ;-) :

var pointString = 
  string.Join(", ",
    points.Select(p => 
      string.Format(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture, "{0} {1}", p.X, p.Y)));

If I had points X=10, Y=15, X=20, Y=25 and X=30 ,Y=40 this would nicely translate to

10 15,20 25,30 40

That's all. No loops, no truncating trailing comma’s: just a Select and a Join

Using extension methods to compress and decompress strings

After some rightful comments by Jarno Peschier I decided to once again look into my blog post about putting compressed object on the Azure message queue and came up with the following set of extensions methods that allow you to compress a string via gzip into a byte array, and unzip a byte array containing a compressed string to a regular string again:

using System.IO;
using System.IO.Compression;
using System.Text;

namespace LocalJoost.Utilities.Compression
{
 public static class StringZipExtensions
 {
  /// <summary>
  /// Compresses the specified string a byte array using the specified
  /// encoding.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="stringToCompress">The string to compress.</param>
  /// <param name="encoding">The encoding.</param>
  /// <returns>bytes array with compressed string</returns>
  public static byte[] Compress(
   this string stringToCompress, 
    Encoding encoding )
   {
    var stringAsBytes = encoding.GetBytes(stringToCompress);
    using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
    {
     using (var zipStream = new GZipStream(memoryStream,
      CompressionMode.Compress))
     {
      zipStream.Write(stringAsBytes, 0, stringAsBytes.Length);
      zipStream.Close();
      return (memoryStream.ToArray());
     }
    }
   }

   /// <summary>
   /// Compresses the specified string a byte array using default
   /// UTF8 encoding.
   /// </summary>
   /// <param name="stringToCompress">The string to compress.</param>
   /// <returns>bytes array with compressed string</returns>
  public static byte[] Compress( this string stringToCompress )
  {
   return Compress(stringToCompress, new UTF8Encoding());
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Decompress an array of bytes to a string using the specified
  /// encoding
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="compressedString">The compressed string.</param>
  /// <param name="encoding">The encoding.</param>
  /// <returns>Decompressed string</returns>
  public static string DecompressToString(
   this byte[] compressedString, 
   Encoding encoding)
  {
   const int bufferSize = 1024;
   using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(compressedString))
   {
    using (var zipStream = new GZipStream(memoryStream,
     CompressionMode.Decompress))
    {
     // Memory stream for storing the decompressed bytes
     using (var outStream = new MemoryStream())
     {
      var buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
      var totalBytes = 0;
      int readBytes;
      while ((readBytes = zipStream.Read(buffer,0, bufferSize)) > 0)
      {
       outStream.Write(buffer, 0, readBytes);
       totalBytes += readBytes;
      }
      return encoding.GetString(
       outStream.GetBuffer(),0, totalBytes);     
     }
    }
   }
  }

  /// <summary>
  /// Decompress an array of bytes to a string using default
  /// UTF8 encoding.
  /// </summary>
  /// <param name="compressedString">The compressed string.</param>
  /// <returns>Decompressed string</returns>
  public static string DecompressToString(this byte[] compressedString )
  {
   return DecompressToString(compressedString, new UTF8Encoding());
  }
 }
}

You can now quite simply do something like

using LocalJoost.Utilities.Compression;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace LocalJoost.Utilities.Test
{
  [TestFixture]
  public class TestCompress
  {
    [Test]
    public void TestZipUnzip()
    {
      const string test = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
      var compressed = test.Compress();
      var uncompressed = compressed.DecompressToString();
      Assert.AreEqual(test, uncompressed);
    }
  }
}

and that will work, of course ;-) Both the Compress and the DecompressToString methods use UTF8 as default encoding as Jarno suggested by Live Messenger, but both methods also sport an overload which allow you to provide an encoding yourself. This will support almost any encoding - provided of course you use the same encoding to compress and decompress. So, this can even be used to compress strings containing Klingon messages - I hope this will earn me a fond majQa' from Jarno ;-) Code downloadable here