Formatting strings in C#

Question

I'm trying to format array elements to look like a table with some columns to have right alignment and some left as shown in Composite Formatting article (or What is the optional argument in C# interpolated string for?)

Why I'm getting FormatException on call to Console.WriteLine?

Here is sample that demonstrates this:

using System;
namespace ConsoleApplication97
{
    class Program
    {
        public struct User
        {
            public string Name;
            public byte Age;
        }
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            User[] Bar = new User[2];
            Bar[0].Name = "Jan Kowalski";
            Bar[0].Age = 32;
            Bar[1].Name = "Piotr Nowak";
            Bar[1].Age = 56;
            for (int i = 0; i < Bar.Length; i++)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0 , -15} | { 1,  5}", Bar[i].Name, Bar[i].Age);
            }
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Value "Name" should be on the left side (alignment -15), "Age" should be on the right side (alignment 5).

D Stanley · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-28 17:00:21Z

9

Interesting - the formatter seems to be picky about excess whitespace in format strings. This worked for me:

Console.WriteLine("{0, -15} | {1, 5}", Bar[i].Name, Bar[i].Age);

edited Sep 28, 2016 at 17:00

answered Sep 28, 2016 at 16:59

D Stanley

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2 Comments

Jeroen van Langen Over a year ago

Saw it also: Console.WriteLine("{0 , -15} | { 1, 5}", Bar[i].Name, Bar[i].Age);

Quantic Over a year ago

It appears that anything that supports Composite Formatting, such as Console.WriteLine and string.Format, have this whitespace issue where they give a FormatException if there's spaces after any opening bracket { (it seems to support spaces anywhere else, however). But note that string interpolation doesn't have this issue: Console.WriteLine($"{ Bar[i].Name, -15} | { Bar[i].Age, 5}"); works fine for me.

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