translate special character in strings

Question

I have a program that reads from a xml document. In this xml document some of the attributes contain special characters like "\n", "\t", etc.

Is there an easy way to replace all of these strings with the actual character or do I just have to do it manually for each character like the following example?

Manual example:

s.Replace("\\n", "\n").Replace("\\t", "\t")...

edit:

I'm looking for some way to treat the string like an escaped string like this(even though I know this doesn't work)

s.Replace("\\", "\");

Check this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11584148/how-to-convert-a-string-containing-escape-characters-to-a-string — bosnjak, Mar 20 '14 at 23:19
Please show an example of the XML you're talking about. `\n` is not a special character in XML. — John Saunders, Mar 20 '14 at 23:19
He could have a value that contains special characters in XML. — bosnjak, Mar 20 '14 at 23:20

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 21 '14 at 00:28

2

Try Regex.Unescape().

Official docs here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.regularexpressions.regex.unescape(v=vs.110).aspx

answered Mar 21 '14 at 00:28

Manuel Spezzani

1,041
7
15

That is pretty neat. Might come in handy. – GregRos Mar 21 '14 at 00:42

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 20 '14 at 23:20

Why not just walk the document and build up the new string in one pass. Saves a lot of duplicate searching and intermediate allocations

string ConvertSpecialCharacters(string input) {
  var builder = new StringBuilder();
  bool inEscape = false;
  for (int i = 0; i < input.Length ; i++) {
    if (inEscape) {
     switch (input[i]) {
      case 'n':  
        builder.Append('\t');
        break;
      case 't':
        builder.Append('\n');
        break;
      default:
        builder.Append('\\');
        builder.Append(input[i]);
    }
    else if (input[i] == '\\' && i + 1 < input.Length) {
      inEscape = true;
    }
    else {
      builder.Append(input[i]);
    } 
  }
  return builder.ToString();
}

but that would require me to enter all escapable characters as cases. I am looking for a way to not do that. I edited the question to show what I am looking for. — Tony Brix, Mar 21 '14 at 00:35

translate special character in strings

2 Answers2