Why isn't String.Empty a constant?

.net string readonly constants
travis picture travis · Feb 3, 2009 · Viewed 17.8k times · Source

In .Net why is String.Empty read only instead of a constant? I'm just wondering if anyone knows what the reasoning was behind that decision.

Answer

Jeff Yates picture Jeff Yates · Feb 3, 2009

The reason that static readonly is used instead of const is due to use with unmanaged code, as indicated by Microsoft here in the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure 2.0 Release. The file to look at is sscli20\clr\src\bcl\system\string.cs.

The Empty constant holds the empty string value. We need to call the String constructor so that the compiler doesn't mark this as a literal.

Marking this as a literal would mean that it doesn't show up as a field which we can access from native.

I found this information from this handy article at CodeProject.

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