Things I learned today about C#

[andrewducker]

The code I've been writing to convert a list into a comma-delimited string that consists of:
var duckerBrothers = new List<string> { "Andy", "Mike", "Hugh" };
var output = string.Empty;
foreach (var duckerBrother in duckerBrothers)
{
if (output != string.Empty)
{
output += ", ";
}

output += duckerBrother;
}

Can be rewritten as:
var duckerBrothers = new List<string> { "Andy", "Mike", "Hugh" };
var output = string.Join(",", duckerBrothers);

That's what I get for assuming that there is no built-in way of doing things.

Comments

[simont]

Hmmm, so apparently the convention of not capitalising the first letter in camelCase trumps the convention of capitalising the first letter in people's surnames. Learn something new every day :-)

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. The Microsoft guidelines are very specific.

[akicif]

And "brotherDuckers" would just look silly...

Actually, wouldn't your way, rather than the built-in way, be better if you wanted to replace the final ", " with " and "?

[simont]

I had that problem in Python once, and found it needed fewer special-case handlers than I'd expected:

    answer = ", ".join(words[:-2] + [" and ".join(words[-2:])])

Though that does rely on Python's array slice expressions having the right edge-case behaviour when the array gets shorter than 2 elements, and I don't know if C# will do the same.

[andrewducker]

Having checked, I can grab the last entry of a list easily, but grabbing the last two isn't built in, so I'd have to write my own code for it.

It's not quite as neat as Python, certainly!

[pozorvlak]

brothersDucker?

[akicif]

Ha! Of course. Clearly the real reason I'm not a coder is my eye for detail....

[andrewducker]

Oh yes. If I wanted to do anything complex then I'd do it by hand.