How to easily check if a string is blank or full of an undetermined amount of spaces, or not?
6 Answers
If you have .NET 4, use the string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace method:
if(string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(myStringValue))
{
// ...
}
If you don't have .NET 4, and you can stand to trim your strings, you could trim it first, then check if it is empty.
Otherwise, you could look into implementing it yourself:
.Net 3.5 Implementation of String.IsNullOrWhitespace with Code Contracts
7 Comments
string.IsNullOrEmpty(YourString)IsNullOrEmpty vs IsNullOrWhiteSpaceIf it's already known to you that the string is not null, and you just want to make sure it's not a blank string use the following:
public static bool IsEmptyOrWhiteSpace(this string value) =>
value.All(char.IsWhiteSpace);
1 Comment
value?.All(char.IsWhiteSpace) ?? false — or you can employ less fancy short-circuit evaluation: value != null && value.All(char.IsWhiteSpace)if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(myStringValue?.Trim()))
Use trim() so that whitespace strings become empty. This way you only use string.IsNullOrEmpty to check for null, whitespace, and empty strings.
1 Comment
If you literally need to know if the "string is blank or full of an undetermined amount of spaces", use LINQ as @Sonia_yt suggests, but use All() to ensure that you efficiently short-circuit out as soon as you've found a non-space.
(This is give or take the same as Shimmy's, but answers the OP's question as written to only check for spaces, not any and all whitespace -- \t, \n, \r, etc.)
/// <summary>
/// Ensure that the string is either the empty string `""` or contains
/// *ONLY SPACES* without any other character OR whitespace type.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="str">The string to check.</param>
/// <returns>`true` if string is empty or only made up of spaces. Otherwise `false`.</returns>
public static bool IsEmptyOrAllSpaces(this string str)
{
return null != str && str.All(c => c.Equals(' '));
}
And to test it in a console app...
Console.WriteLine(" ".IsEmptyOrAllSpaces()); // true
Console.WriteLine("".IsEmptyOrAllSpaces()); // true
Console.WriteLine(" BOO ".IsEmptyOrAllSpaces()); // false
string testMe = null;
Console.WriteLine(testMe.IsEmptyOrAllSpaces()); // false
4 Comments
!enumerable.Any(x => !predicate(x)) = enumerable.All(x => predicate(x)) Just convoluted thinking.string testMe = null; testMe.IndexOf("spam"); and getting An unhandled exception of type 'System.NullReferenceException' occurred, but that's the "fault" of IndexOf, not that the string was null. Score one for cargo culting/elephant whistles. "Hey, calling string functions like IndexOf on null strings breaks. Better not use extension methods on null strings. [Using extension methods on non-null strings never breaks.] See?!" (◔_◔)All is better, but his answer also makes the same "mistake" as Merlyn's... the set of whitespace characters > the set of space characters. ;^) I'll edit to use All. The double negative looked odd when I was writing it, and I just added a comment instead of figuring out The Right Thing To Do... Fail. Just wanted to quickly show checking for null wasn't a huge burden, which Merlyn seemed to suggest it was. /shrug Thanks for the catch.Try use LinQ to solve?
if(from c in yourString where c != ' ' select c).Count() != 0)
This will return true if the string is not all spaces.
1 Comment
Enumerable.All<TSource> employs short-circuit evaluation, see .NET reference source.