C# variable names with special character

Question

I want to include some special characters in a string variable name in C#.

Example: string foo-bar = String.Empty;

As far as my understand I can't declare a variable as I mentioned in the above example. Is there any way around to declare a variable name with "-" included?

Answer 1

From MSDN:

You can't just choose any sequence of characters as a variable name. This isn't as worrying as it might sound, however, because you're still left with a very flexible naming system. The basic variable naming rules are as follows:

The first character of a variable name must be either a letter, an underscore character (_), or the at symbol (@). Subsequent characters may be letters, underscore characters, or numbers.

Answer 2

No, this is not possible to do in C#.

---

If you really, really, really want to so this, you could use a Dictionary<string, string>:

Dictionary<string, string> someVars = new Dictionary<string, string>()
                                      {
                                          {"foo-bar", String.Empty},
                                          {"bar-foo", "bazinga"}
                                      }

Using them would look like this:

string newstring = someVars["foo-bar"] + "Hello World!";

Instead of just using the variable name, you would look up the string in your dictionary. Note that this is very inefficient and just intended as a joke, so please do no really use this ;)

Answer 3

If you are trying to deserialize object, you can use JsonProperty to acieve this.

Example:

public class SubscriptionListJsonData
{
    [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "subscriptions")]
    public string SubscriptionData { get; set; }
    [JsonProperty(PropertyName = "@nextLink")]
    public string nextLink { get; set; }
}

Follow this link for partially reading Json.

Answer 4

You can't do that in c# and most of other programming languages .. I also advice you to follow the C# naming conventions as it help you read your code in a way that -at least for me- always felt comfortable .