What is the maximum possible length of a .NET string?

Question

What is the longest string that can be created in .NET? The docs for the String class are silent on this question as far as I can see, so an authoritative answer might require some knowledge of internals. Would the maximum change on a 64-bit system?

[This is asked more for curiosity than for practical use - I don't intend to create any code that uses gigantic strings!]

Answer 1

The theoretical limit may be 2,147,483,647, but the practical limit is nowhere near that. Since no single object in a .NET program may be over 2GB and the string type uses UTF-16 (2 bytes for each character), the best you could do is 1,073,741,823, but you're not likely to ever be able to allocate that on a 32-bit machine.

This is one of those situations where "If you have to ask, you're probably doing something wrong."