Better way to remove special characters from a string

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!

-KellyStart Free Trial