How to create custom string formatters with C# .NET

.NET has a fairly large number of built-in string formatters that you can pass into the string.Format method. Here are some examples from the MSDN page about formatting:

String.Format("{0,-12}{1,8:yyyy}{2,12:N0}{3,8:yyyy}{4,12:N0}{5,14:P1}",
                                city.Item1, city.Item2, city.Item3, city.Item4, city.Item5,
                                (city.Item5 - city.Item3)/ (double)city.Item3);
String.Format("{0,-12}{1,8}{2,12}{1,8}{2,12}{3,14}\n",
                                    "City", "Year", "Population", "Change (%)");
String.Format("{0,-10:C}", 126347.89m);         

The IFormatProvider and ICustomFormatter interfaces will provide you with the methods required to create your own formats.

The IFormatProvider requires you to implement one method: GetFormat which returns the object that provides the custom formatting. This is even implied by the name of the interface: “format” and “provider”. It generally returns an object that implements the ICustomFormatter interface.

Let’s say you’d like to capitalise all characters in a string. You can of course use the ToUpper() method but this is an easy entry point into this exercise. Here comes our IFormatProvider object:

public class CapitalisationFormatProvider : IFormatProvider
{
	public object GetFormat(Type formatType)
	{
		if (formatType == typeof(ICustomFormatter))
		{
			return new CapitalisationCustomFormatter();
		}

		return null;
	}		
}

…and here’s the CapitalisationCustomFormatter object:

public class CapitalisationCustomFormatter : ICustomFormatter
{
	public string Format(string format, object arg, IFormatProvider formatProvider)
	{
		return arg.ToString().ToUpper();
	}
}

Let’s try this in action:

string toBeCapitalised = "i'm too lazy to capitalise these letters.";
string capitalisedVersion = string.Format(new CapitalisationFormatProvider(), "New version: {0}", toBeCapitalised);

“capitalisedVersion” will be

New version: I’M TOO LAZY TO CAPITALISE THESE LETTERS.

If you provide more string arguments to the params array then all of them will be capitalised:

string toBeCapitalised = "i'm too lazy to capitalise these letters.";
string capitalisedVersion = string.Format(new CapitalisationFormatProvider(), "New version: {0}, {1}, {2}", toBeCapitalised, "hello", "good bye");

“capitalisedVersion” will now become

New version: I’M TOO LAZY TO CAPITALISE THESE LETTERS., HELLO, GOOD BYE

What if you’d like to denote the capitalisation formatting in a special way and not apply it to all params elements automatically? You can use the “:” operator inside the placeholders much the same way as :C or :yyyy are used in the above examples from MSDN:

string toBeCapitalised = "i'm too lazy to capitalise these letters.";
string capitalisedVersion = string.Format(new CapitalisationFormatProvider(), "New version: {0:cap}, {1}, {2:cap}", toBeCapitalised, "hello", "good bye");

We intend to apply the capitalisation to the first and last elements of the params arguments. We need to modify the CapitalisationCustomFormatter object slightly:

public class CapitalisationCustomFormatter : ICustomFormatter
{
	public string Format(string format, object arg, IFormatProvider formatProvider)
	{
		if (format == "cap")
		{
			return arg.ToString().ToUpper();
		}
		return arg.ToString();
	}
}

Check out the if statement where we see if the format is equal to “cap”. capitalisedVersion will now become

New version: I’M TOO LAZY TO CAPITALISE THESE LETTERS., hello, GOOD BYE

View all posts related to string and text operations here.