C# - How to Reverse a Unicode String

Perhaps due to the lack of a built-in String.Reverse method in the .NET Framework, it's very common for implementations of such a method to be posted.

Unfortunately, most of these implementations do not handle characters outside Unicode's Basic Multilingual Plane correctly. These supplementary characters have code points between U+10000 and U+10FFFF and so cannot be represented with one 16-bit char. In UTF-16 (which is how .NET strings are encoded), these Unicode characters are represented as two C# chars, a high surrogatefollowed by a low surrogate. When the string is reversed, the order of these two chars has to be preserved.

Here's our method that reverses a string while handling surrogate code units correctly:

/// <summary>

/// Reverses the specified string.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="input">The string to reverse.</param>

/// <returns>The input string, reversed.</returns>

/// <remarks>This method correctly reverses strings containing supplementary characters

/// (which are encoded with two surrogate code units).</remarks>

public static string Reverse(this string input)

{

    if (input == null)

        throw new ArgumentNullException("input");

    // allocate a buffer to hold the output

    char[] output = new char[input.Length];

    for (int outputIndex = 0, inputIndex = input.Length - 1; outputIndex <    input.Length; outputIndex++, inputIndex--)

    {

        // check for surrogate pair

        if (input[inputIndex] >= 0xDC00 && input[inputIndex] <= 0xDFFF &&

            inputIndex > 0 && input[inputIndex - 1] >= 0xD800 &&  input[inputIndex - 1] <= 0xDBFF)

        {

            // preserve the order of the surrogate pair code units

            output[outputIndex + 1] = input[inputIndex];

            output[outputIndex] = input[inputIndex - 1];

            outputIndex++;

            inputIndex--;

        }

        else

        {

            output[outputIndex] = input[inputIndex];

        }

    }

    return new string(output);

}