Best way to remove the last character from a string built with stringbuilder

The simplest and most efficient way is to perform this command:

data.Length--;

by doing this you move the pointer (i.e. last index) back one character but you don't change the mutability of the object. In fact, clearing a StringBuilder is best done with Length as well (but do actually use the Clear() method for clarity instead because that's what its implementation looks like):

data.Length = 0;

again, because it doesn't change the allocation table. Think of it like saying, I don't want to recognize these bytes anymore. Now, even when calling ToString(), it won't recognize anything past its Length, well, it can't. It's a mutable object that allocates more space than what you provide it, it's simply built this way.

Just use

string.Join(",", yourCollection)

This way you don't need the StringBuilder and the loop.

Long addition about async case. As of 2019, it's not a rare setup when the data are coming asynchronously.

In case your data are in async collection, there is no string.Join overload taking IAsyncEnumerable<T>. But it's easy to create one manually, hacking the code from string.Join:

public static class StringEx
{
    public static async Task<string> JoinAsync<T>(string separator, IAsyncEnumerable<T> seq)
    {
        if (seq == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException(nameof(seq));

        await using (var en = seq.GetAsyncEnumerator())
        {
            if (!await en.MoveNextAsync())
                return string.Empty;

            string firstString = en.Current?.ToString();

            if (!await en.MoveNextAsync())
                return firstString ?? string.Empty;

            // Null separator and values are handled by the StringBuilder
            var sb = new StringBuilder(256);
            sb.Append(firstString);

            do
            {
                var currentValue = en.Current;
                sb.Append(separator);
                if (currentValue != null)
                    sb.Append(currentValue);
            }
            while (await en.MoveNextAsync());
            return sb.ToString();
        }
    }
}

If the data are coming asynchronously but the interface IAsyncEnumerable<T> is not supported (like the mentioned in comments SqlDataReader), it's relatively easy to wrap the data into an IAsyncEnumerable<T>:

async IAsyncEnumerable<(object first, object second, object product)> ExtractData(
        SqlDataReader reader)
{
    while (await reader.ReadAsync())
        yield return (reader[0], reader[1], reader[2]);
}

and use it:

Task<string> Stringify(SqlDataReader reader) =>
    StringEx.JoinAsync(
        ", ",
        ExtractData(reader).Select(x => $"{x.first} * {x.second} = {x.product}"));

In order to use Select, you'll need to use nuget package System.Interactive.Async. Here you can find a compilable example.

Use the following after the loop.

.TrimEnd(',')

or simply change to

string commaSeparatedList = input.Aggregate((a, x) => a + ", " + x)

Best way to remove the last character from a string built with stringbuilder

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