Many .NET developers are baffled by the lack of a “Clear” method in the StringBuilder class.  For example, if you are using a StringBuilder in a loop, you may want to clear its contents at the beginning of each loop.

Options to Clear a StringBuilder

It turns out there are two common ways to clear a StringBuilder:

Option #1:  Create a new StringBuilder object

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

Option #2: Set its Length to zero

sb.Length = 0;

Which Option is Better?

Setting the Length property to zero is about 25% faster than creating a new StringBuilder object every time.

Option 2 seems intuitively better because it does not create a new object on the heap every time.  Even so, it’s not likely to make a noticeable performance difference in your software.  When looping a million times on a fast PC, setting the Length to zero is about 1 second faster than creating a new object.

Sample Console Program

Here is a simple console program that demonstrates this:

using System;
using System.Text; 

namespace CSharp411
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main( string[] args )
        {
            int loops = 1000000;
            int maxLength = 100; 

            DateTime time1 = DateTime.Now;
            for (int i = 0; i < loops; i++)
            {
                StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
                for (int j = 0; j < maxLength; j++)
                {
                    sb.Append( 'a' );
                }
            } 

            DateTime time2 = DateTime.Now;
            StringBuilder sb2 = new StringBuilder();
            for (int i = 0; i < loops; i++)
            {
                sb2.Length = 0;
                for (int j = 0; j < maxLength; j++)
                {
                    sb2.Append( 'a' );
                }
            }
            DateTime time3 = DateTime.Now; 

            Console.WriteLine( "new = {0}, append = {1}", time2.Subtract( time1 ), time3.Subtract( time2 ) );
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

The results of this program on my PC were:

new = 00:00:04.1050000, append = 00:00:03.0690000