Rudolf blog of all

A quick one to share:

I needed to a method to quickly convert a List<string> to a plain comma delimited string. So I created this little Extension class:

public static class ListEx
{

public static string ToCSVString(this List<string> l)
{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
if (l != null)
{

l.ForEach(li => sb.Append(li + “, “));

}
return sb.ToString().Trim(‘ ‘, ‘,’);

}

}

Of course this is still very specific to string collections only. I could have created something that does the same to say a List<T> list that is more generic but that I’ll leave for another day.

[Update]

While I’m at it – here is the opposite method:

public static List<string> ToListFromCSVString(this string s, bool ordered = false)
{

List<string> list = new List<string>();
if (s != null && s.Trim().Length > 0)
{

if (ordered)

list.AddRange((from sitem in s.Split(new char[] { ‘,’ }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
orderby sitem
select sitem.Trim()).ToArray());

else

list.AddRange((from sitem in s.Split(new char[] { ‘,’ }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
select sitem.Trim()).ToArray());

}

return list;

}