What's the regular expression in .NET to remove special chars?

Question

I'm looking for a regular expression that can remove all the following characters from a string (and whitespace too):

~ % & \ ; : " ' , < > ? #

I tried it with following code:

var MyCleanString = Regex.Replace(InputString, @"[~%&\\;:,<>?#\s]", String.Empty);

and it is not working.

This seems similar to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1120198/most-efficient-way-to-remove-special-characters-from-string — BlackVegetable, Jun 28 '12 at 15:28
Have you tried the \W wildcard? It won't do whitespace though. You'll need \s for that. — mj_, Jun 28 '12 at 15:29
@KentZhou, Does it need to be regex? String.Replace() or StringBuilder.Replace() is going to be faster and I don't see a compelling reason to opt for the regex solution in this case. — unhappyCrackers1, Jun 28 '12 at 15:39

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 28 '12 at 15:34

0

The code below prints "abcdef", so I'm not sure why you would say that it doesn't work.

var InputString = "abc~%&\\;:,<>?# def";
var MyCleanString = Regex.Replace(InputString, @"[~%&\\;:,<>?#\s]", String.Empty);

Console.WriteLine(MyCleanString);

answered Jun 28 '12 at 15:34

Brian Rasmussen

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '12 at 15:35

0

Try this :

public static string RemoveChar(string input)
{

Regex r = new Regex("(?:[^a-z0-9 ]|(?<=['\"])s)", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.CultureInvariant | RegexOptions.Compiled);
    return r.Replace(input, String.Empty);
}

answered Jun 28 '12 at 15:35

Ali Vojdanian

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What's the regular expression in .NET to remove special chars?

2 Answers2