What's does the dollar sign ($"string") do?

Question

I have been looking over some C# exercises in a book and I ran across an example that stumped me. Straight from the book, the output line shows as:

Console.WriteLine($"\n\tYour result is {result}.");

The code works and the double result shows as expected. However, not understanding why the $ is there at the front of the string, I decided to remove it, and now the code outputs the name of the array {result} instead of the contents. The book doesn't explain why the $ is there, unfortunately.

I have been scouring the VB 2015 help and Google, regarding string formatting and Console.WriteLine overload methods. I am not seeing anything that explains why it is what it is. Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

It's the new feature in C# 6 called Interpolated Strings.

The easiest way to understand it is: an interpolated string expression creates a string by replacing the contained expressions with the ToString representations of the expressions' results.

For more details about this, please take a look at MSDN.

Now, think a little bit more about it. Why this feature is great?

For example, you have class Point:

public class Point
{
    public int X { get; set; }

    public int Y { get; set; }
}

Create 2 instances:

var p1 = new Point { X = 5, Y = 10 };
var p2 = new Point { X = 7, Y = 3 };

Now, you want to output it to the screen. The 2 ways that you usually use:

Console.WriteLine("The area of interest is bounded by (" + p1.X + "," + p1.Y + ") and (" + p2.X + "," + p2.Y + ")");

As you can see, concatenating string like this makes the code hard to read and error-prone. You may use string.Format() to make it nicer:

Console.WriteLine(string.Format("The area of interest is bounded by({0},{1}) and ({2},{3})", p1.X, p1.Y, p2.X, p2.Y));

This creates a new problem:

1. You have to maintain the number of arguments and index yourself. If the number of arguments and index are not the same, it will generate a runtime error.

For those reasons, we should use new feature:

Console.WriteLine($"The area of interest is bounded by ({p1.X},{p1.Y}) and ({p2.X},{p2.Y})");

The compiler now maintains the placeholders for you so you don’t have to worry about indexing the right argument because you simply place it right there in the string.

For the full post, please read this blog.

Answer 2

String Interpolation

is a concept that languages like Perl have had for quite a while, and now we’ll get this ability in C# as well. In String Interpolation, we simply prefix the string with a $ (much like we use the @ for verbatim strings). Then, we simply surround the expressions we want to interpolate with curly braces (i.e. { and }):

It looks a lot like the String.Format() placeholders, but instead of an index, it is the expression itself inside the curly braces. In fact, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it looks like String.Format() because that’s really all it is – syntactical sugar that the compiler treats like String.Format() behind the scenes.

A great part is, the compiler now maintains the placeholders for you so you don’t have to worry about indexing the right argument because you simply place it right there in the string.

C# string interpolation is a method of concatenating,formatting and manipulating strings. This feature was introduced in C# 6.0. Using string interpolation, we can use objects and expressions as a part of the string interpolation operation.

Syntax of string interpolation starts with a ‘$’ symbol and expressions are defined within a bracket {} using the following syntax.

{<interpolatedExpression>[,<alignment>][:<formatString>]}  

Where:

• interpolatedExpression - The expression that produces a result to be formatted
• alignment - The constant expression whose value defines the minimum number of characters in the string representation of the result of the interpolated expression. If positive, the string representation is right-aligned; if negative, it's left-aligned.
• formatString - A format string that is supported by the type of the expression result.

The following code example concatenates a string where an object, author as a part of the string interpolation.

string author = "Mohit";  
string hello = $"Hello {author} !";  
Console.WriteLine(hello);  // Hello Mohit !

Read more on C#/.NET Little Wonders: String Interpolation in C# 6