How to replace "\" with "" or empty?

Question

I want to use

XmlReader.Create(aString);

to read XML. but there are many "\" in this aString, which cause an error:

Illegal characters in path.

So I want to replace all "\" with "".

I've tried:

aString.Replace("\", "");
aString.Replace("\\", "");
aString.Replace(@"\", "");
aString.Replace(@"\", string.Empty);

None of them works.

I have edited your title. Please see, "[Should questions include “tags” in their titles?](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/19190/)", where the consensus is "no, they should not". — John Saunders, Jun 20 '13 at 17:33
Are you *sure* the backslashes are really there? If so, shouldn't you be going through some uniform unescaping first, rather than just backslashes? Also note that you're currently ignoring the return value of `Replace`, which isn't going to work. If you could give us more context, we may well be able to suggest a better option. — Jon Skeet, Jun 20 '13 at 17:33
What goes wrong? Are you assigning the value of `aString.Replace("\\","");` back into aString? — Mike Precup, Jun 20 '13 at 17:33
How do you end up with a badly formed string in the first place? Maybe the better fix is upstream. — Damien_The_Unbeliever, Jun 20 '13 at 17:34
@dasblinkenlight: You're marking as a duplicate of **closed as duplicate** question ;) — abatishchev, Jun 20 '13 at 17:36
You have your answer here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10752852/replacing-backslash-in-a-string — Lucas, Jun 20 '13 at 17:37
@abatishchev This question has been asked so many times, it's no wonder that sooner or later one would close a dupe pointing to another dupe :) — Sergey Kalinichenko, Jun 20 '13 at 17:40
You can look at this for an alternative method of loading a XML file [Illegal characters in path error while parsing XML in C#](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1374729/illegal-characters-in-path-error-while-parsing-xml-in-c-sharp) — Gerhard Powell, Jun 20 '13 at 20:14

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 20 '13 at 17:34

7

You're probably not capturing the output - Replace does not modify the existing string - it returns a new string. Try:

aString = aString.Replace(@"\","");

answered Jun 20 '13 at 17:34

D Stanley

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This is immediately what I thought after looking at the OP – Saggio Jun 20 '13 at 18:01
1

This is what I use in my code which doesn't work: string aString=model.wresult.ToString(); aString=aString.Replace(@"\",""); XmlReader reader=XmlReader.Create(aString); – howexg9 Jun 20 '13 at 18:36
1

What is your input string? Are you sure the "\" character is the only illegal character? – D Stanley Jun 20 '13 at 18:49

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 20 '13 at 17:39

0

You're not assigning the output of String.Replace() method anywhere. Replace method does not modify the object.

answered Jun 20 '13 at 17:39

Peuczynski

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This is what I use in my code, which doesn't work: string aString=model.wresult.ToString(); aString=aString.Replace(@"\",""); XmlReader reader=XmlReader.Create(aString); – howexg9 Jun 20 '13 at 18:34

Gerhard Powell · Answer 3 · 2013-06-20T20:36:02.707

I see that there are \" in your code. That is how VisualStudio shows ". (The \ is in the case a escape char and not the actual char. The data in aString is correct and there is no reason to try to remove the \ from aString. The problem lays with what you are doing with aString, and not with the \ inside aString.

Please note: XmlReader.Create(aString); reads a XML file from the path aString. XmlDocument.LoadXml(string) parse a XML file.

How to replace "\" with "" or empty?

3 Answers3