String.Format gottach
I saw this recently over an
internal email list and I thought I’d share it…
A developer asks:
I’ve found
a bug in the way String.Format handles close curly literals. It’s provoked
by having a format specifier on a string. The attached code demonstrates
this on .NET Framework 1.1. The core of it goes as follows:
//
BUG: "}}" to get a literal "}" doesn't work
// when ":d" (or other) format
specifier is present:
string
wrong = String.Format("{{{0:d}}}", 42);
Here I’d
expect the produced string to be “{42}”, but instead I get “{d}”. I first
ran into this bug using the :x (hex) format specifier, so I expect others are
also implicated.
Kit George, the PM for this
feature responds:
This actually isn’t a bug.
Consider this example:
string right1=String.Format("{0:d!}",
42);
We know that’s the wrong format
specifier in the middle there (d!), but if we Console.WriteLine the result, we
get:
d!
Going a step further:
string right3=String.Format("{{{0:d!}}}",
42);
produces
{d!}
So the first thing we know is, if
you put in a string for the
specifier that is longer than one character, string.format simply prints that
literal out.
The reason you’re item comes out
the way it does, is because we resolve the escaped curly brackets in the order
we’re given them. Therefore:
{{ is escaped
{0:d looks like formatting
}} is
escaped
} ends
the formatting section
Therefore, the formatting routine
thinks that what’s in the formatting section is in fact:
0:d}
It therefore simply prints out
d} as a literal, just like it
prints out d!, if that’s what we
had given it.
However, I have made sure the
docs for this area get cleaned up to make this more clear.