Originally posted by Nick Heppleston at: http://www.modhul.com/2009/03/19/interesting-quirk-when-formatting-guids-as-strings/
I noticed an interesting quirk last night while trying to format a Guid into a string representation – by default, Guid.ToString() does not return an accurate representation of a GUID with curly braces. Hmmmmmm…..
Consider the following simple test, here we are instantiating a new Guid and before outputting the value to the debugger, we capture its value – note the curly braces at the end of the Guid:
If we let the test run its course, we get the Guid formatted as a string (using the default formatter) written to the debugger, but there are no curly braces:
After much head scratching and Googling, I decided to look at the MSDN documentation for the Guid.ToString() method – low and behold there are several format specifiers that can be provided to the ToString() method which determine the formatting provided to the resultant string. Using the format specifiers:
we get the desired output:
If no format specifier is used (i.e. we just Guid.ToString()), the default format is ‘D’ – no braces.
Sheesh, nice catch. Never knew that.
And you need to blog this? Read the fucking manual.
LK, I don’t know if this is a spam comment or not… I’d be much more inclined to take your comment onboard if I knew who was making such an insightful contribution.
Care to identify yourself?
Nick.
This isn’t a “Quirk” — when in the debugger, it knows that a GUID is a structure and the standard “structure value formatter” that displays the tooltip builds “[struct name] ‘{‘ [instance.ToString()] ‘}’” so you get the ‘{}’; Your “Trace.WriteLine” doesn’t included this additional formatting so you don’t see them…