I am a bit late getting onto the whole Technorati thing. But I thought it was about time I gave it a go.

Here is a link to my profile: Technorati Profile

It really bugs me that C# does not have an equivalent of VB’s Left function. I know I could be using text.Substring(0,length) but this has the rather annoying feature of throwing an exception if the string is shorter than the length parameter. In 99.999999% of cases what I actually want it to do is return as much as it can instead.

Anyway here is my equivalent:

public static string Left(string text, int length)
{
    if (length < 0)
        throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("length", length, "length must be > 0");
    else if (length == 0 || text.Length == 0)
        return "";
    else if (text.Length <= length)
        return text;
    else
        return text.Substring(0, length);
}