CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
Gyan
Gyan

Reputation: 121

How is String.Length implemented in C#?

As per my understanding, there is no null-termination at the end of a C# string. So how does Length get to know how many characters a string have?

Thanks, Gyan

Upvotes: 7

Views: 779

Answers (1)

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1500993

It's stored in a field within the object.

As it happens, strings are null-terminated internally in the current implementation of .NET, but that's only for the sake of interop, so that code which does expect null-terminated strings can be given the same chunk of memory to work with.

Note that having it in a field is a good idea in terms of performance anyway - it makes finding the length an O(1) operation instead of O(N).

Upvotes: 16

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