Best way to reverse a string

Question

I've just had to write a string reverse function in C# 2.0 (i.e. LINQ not available) and came up with this:

public string Reverse(string text)
{
    char[] cArray = text.ToCharArray();
    string reverse = String.Empty;
    for (int i = cArray.Length - 1; i > -1; i--)
    {
        reverse += cArray[i];
    }
    return reverse;
}

Personally I'm not crazy about the function and am convinced that there's a better way to do it. Is there?

Answer 1

If you want to play a really dangerous game, then this is by far the fastest way there is (around four times faster than the Array.Reverse method). It's an in-place reverse using pointers.

Note that I really do not recommend this for any use, ever (have a look here for some reasons why you should not use this method), but it's just interesting to see that it can be done, and that strings aren't really immutable once you turn on unsafe code.

public static unsafe string Reverse(string text)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
    {
        return text;
    }

    fixed (char* pText = text)
    {
        char* pStart = pText;
        char* pEnd = pText + text.Length - 1;
        for (int i = text.Length / 2; i >= 0; i--)
        {
            char temp = *pStart;
            *pStart++ = *pEnd;
            *pEnd-- = temp;
        }

        return text;
    }
}

Answer 2

I've made a C# port from Microsoft.VisualBasic.Strings. I'm not sure why they keep such useful functions (from VB) outside the System.String in Framework, but still under Microsoft.VisualBasic. Same scenario for financial functions (e.g. Microsoft.VisualBasic.Financial.Pmt()).

public static string StrReverse(this string expression)
{
    if ((expression == null))
        return "";

    int srcIndex;

    var length = expression.Length;
    if (length == 0)
        return "";

    //CONSIDER: Get System.String to add a surrogate aware Reverse method

    //Detect if there are any graphemes that need special handling
    for (srcIndex = 0; srcIndex <= length - 1; srcIndex++)
    {
        var ch = expression[srcIndex];
        var uc = char.GetUnicodeCategory(ch);
        if (uc == UnicodeCategory.Surrogate || uc == UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark || uc == UnicodeCategory.SpacingCombiningMark || uc == UnicodeCategory.EnclosingMark)
        {
            //Need to use special handling
            return InternalStrReverse(expression, srcIndex, length);
        }
    }

    var chars = expression.ToCharArray();
    Array.Reverse(chars);
    return new string(chars);
}

///<remarks>This routine handles reversing Strings containing graphemes
/// GRAPHEME: a text element that is displayed as a single character</remarks>
private static string InternalStrReverse(string expression, int srcIndex, int length)
{
    //This code can only be hit one time
    var sb = new StringBuilder(length) { Length = length };

    var textEnum = StringInfo.GetTextElementEnumerator(expression, srcIndex);

    //Init enumerator position
    if (!textEnum.MoveNext())
    {
        return "";
    }

    var lastSrcIndex = 0;
    var destIndex = length - 1;

    //Copy up the first surrogate found
    while (lastSrcIndex < srcIndex)
    {
        sb[destIndex] = expression[lastSrcIndex];
        destIndex -= 1;
        lastSrcIndex += 1;
    }

    //Now iterate through the text elements and copy them to the reversed string
    var nextSrcIndex = textEnum.ElementIndex;

    while (destIndex >= 0)
    {
        srcIndex = nextSrcIndex;

        //Move to next element
        nextSrcIndex = (textEnum.MoveNext()) ? textEnum.ElementIndex : length;
        lastSrcIndex = nextSrcIndex - 1;

        while (lastSrcIndex >= srcIndex)
        {
            sb[destIndex] = expression[lastSrcIndex];
            destIndex -= 1;
            lastSrcIndex -= 1;
        }
    }

    return sb.ToString();
}

Answer 3

private static string Reverse(string str)
        {
            string revStr = string.Empty;
            for (int i = str.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
            {
                revStr += str[i].ToString();
            }
            return revStr;
        }

Faster than above method

private static string ReverseEx(string str)
        {
            char[] chrArray = str.ToCharArray();
            int len = chrArray.Length - 1;
            char rev = 'n';
            for (int i = 0; i <= len/2; i++)
            {
                rev = chrArray[i];
                chrArray[i] = chrArray[len - i];
                chrArray[len - i] = rev;
            }
            return new string(chrArray);
        }

Answer 4

Firstly you don't need to call ToCharArray as a string can already be indexed as a char array, so this will save you an allocation.

The next optimisation is to use a StringBuilder to prevent unnecessary allocations (as strings are immutable, concatenating them makes a copy of the string each time). To further optimise this we pre-set the length of the StringBuilder so it won't need to expand its buffer.

public string Reverse(string text)
{
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
    {
        return text;
    }

    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(text.Length);
    for (int i = text.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
    {
        builder.Append(text[i]);
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}

Edit: Performance Data

I tested this function and the function using Array.Reverse with the following simple program, where Reverse1 is one function and Reverse2 is the other:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    var text = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

    // pre-jit
    text = Reverse1(text); 
    text = Reverse2(text);

    // test
    var timer1 = Stopwatch.StartNew();
    for (var i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
    {
        text = Reverse1(text);
    }

    timer1.Stop();
    Console.WriteLine("First: {0}", timer1.ElapsedMilliseconds);

    var timer2 = Stopwatch.StartNew();
    for (var i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
    {
        text = Reverse2(text);
    }

    timer2.Stop();
    Console.WriteLine("Second: {0}", timer2.ElapsedMilliseconds);

    Console.ReadLine();
}

It turns out that for short strings the Array.Reverse method is around twice as quick as the one above, and for longer strings the difference is even more pronounced. So given that the Array.Reverse method is both simpler and faster I'd recommend you use that rather than this one. I leave this one up here just to show that it isn't the way you should do it (much to my surprise!)

Answer 5

The easy and nice answer is using the Extension Method:

static class ExtentionMethodCollection
{
    public static string Inverse(this string @base)
    {
        return new string(@base.Reverse().ToArray());
    }
}

and here's the output:

string Answer = "12345".Inverse(); // = "54321"

Answer 6

public static string reverse(string s) 
{
    string r = "";
    for (int i = s.Length; i > 0; i--) r += s[i - 1];
    return r;
}