What is the maximum possible length of a .NET string?

.net string limits
McKenzieG1 picture McKenzieG1 · Sep 26, 2008 · Viewed 337.5k times · Source

What is the longest string that can be created in .NET? The docs for the String class are silent on this question as far as I can see, so an authoritative answer might require some knowledge of internals. Would the maximum change on a 64-bit system?

[This is asked more for curiosity than for practical use - I don't intend to create any code that uses gigantic strings!]

Answer

HitScan picture HitScan · Sep 26, 2008

The theoretical limit may be 2,147,483,647, but the practical limit is nowhere near that. Since no single object in a .NET program may be over 2GB and the string type uses UTF-16 (2 bytes for each character), the best you could do is 1,073,741,823, but you're not likely to ever be able to allocate that on a 32-bit machine.

This is one of those situations where "If you have to ask, you're probably doing something wrong."

Related questions

How can I convert String to Int?

I have a TextBoxD1.Text and I want to convert it to an int to store it in a database. How can I do this?

Read More
How do I get a consistent byte representation of strings in C# without manually specifying an encoding?

How do I convert a string to a byte[] in .NET (C#) without manually specifying a specific encoding? I'm going to encrypt the string. I can encrypt it without converting, but I'd still like to know why encoding comes to …

Read More
How to convert UTF-8 byte[] to string?

I have a byte[] array that is loaded from a file that I happen to known contains UTF-8. In some debugging code, I need to convert it to a string. Is there a one liner that will do this? Under …

Read More