Question

Better way to remove special characters from a string

Asked by: kellycoinguy

This is my lame excuse for a routine to remove special characters from a string (I just want the spaces preserved so I can then turn it into a CamelCase variable name... is there a better way?

      static public string removeSpecialCharacters(string orig)
      {
            string rv;

            // replacing with space allows the camelcase to work a little better in most cases.
            rv = orig.Replace("\\"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("("," ");
            rv = rv.Replace(")"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("/"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("-"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace(","," ");
            rv = rv.Replace(">"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("<"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("-"," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("&"," ");

            // single quotes shouldn't result in CamelCase variables like Patient's -> PatientS
            // "smart" forward quote
            rv = rv.Replace("'","");
            
            // if you have to find any more weird unicode chars, look here:
            // http://seth.positivism.org/man.cgi/7/groff_char
            rv = rv.Replace("\u2019",""); // smart forward (possessive) quote.

            // make sure to get rid of double spaces.
            rv = rv.Replace("   "," ");
            rv = rv.Replace("  "," ");

            rv = rv.Trim(' '); // Remove leading and trailing spaces.

            return(rv);
      }

Thanks!

-Kelly

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Asked On
2005-05-06 at 15:05:22ID21415748
Tags

special

,

remove

,

characters

,

string

,

from

Topic

C# Programming Language

Participating Experts
2
Points
250
Comments
5

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Answers

 

by: neerajsoniPosted on 2005-05-07 at 05:42:34ID: 13950494

you can use System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(input, pattern, replacement) function which returns the updated string.

 

by: neerajsoniPosted on 2005-05-07 at 05:46:30ID: 13950502

for example,
System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace("0we-are-making-it-happen1","[-0-9]"," ");

returns

we are making it happen

All hyphans and numbers are replaced with space.

 

by: kellycoinguyPosted on 2005-05-17 at 15:37:57ID: 14023058

Yes, I'm well aware of the Regex.Replace... so what is the regular expression for all non A-Z a-z _ chars? ^[A-Za-z_] ??

-Kelly

 

by: sajain84Posted on 2008-07-23 at 03:45:58ID: 22067718

It is actually [^a-zA-Z_]
I tried it and this works - the caret ^ needs to be inside the bracket for this to work.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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