LSet, RSet

LSet and RSet are string padding Functions. They allow you to pad the right (LSet) and left (RSet) sides of a string with spaces.

Here we look at these VB.NET functions in more detail. Usually in VB.NET we prefer PadRight and PadLeft on strings—these are more common because they are used in C#.

First example

Let's begin by looking at the LSet and RSet in a program. We see that the string returned by LSet is padded to 20 characters total by adding spaces to the right.

Module Module1
    Sub Main()
        ' Use LSet and RSet.
        Console.WriteLine("[{0}]", LSet("abcd", 20))
        Console.WriteLine("[{0}]", RSet("abcd", 20))
        Console.WriteLine("[{0}]", LSet("abcd", 2))
        Console.WriteLine("[{0}]", RSet("abcd", 2))
    End Sub
End Module
[abcd                ]
[                abcd]
[ab]
[ab]

Internals

The implementation of LSet and RSet in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll is simple. LSet internally calls PadRight. RSet internally calls PadLeft.

Internals, substring

These functions call Substring if you specify that the string be reduced below its current length. So they either pad or truncate.

We looked at LSet and RSet. We peeked inside the Visual Basic implementation. These functions truncate or pad strings without any If-statements added directly to your code.