I have a string of text and want to ensure that it contains at most one single occurrence of a specific character (,). Therefore I want to keep the first one, but simply remove all further occurrences of that character.
How could I do this the most elegant way using C#?
This works, but not the most elegant for sure :-)
string a = "12,34,56,789";
int pos = 1 + a.IndexOf(',');
return a.Substring(0, pos) + a.Substring(pos).Replace(",", string.Empty);
You could use a counter variable and a StringBuilder to create the new string efficiently:
var sb = new StringBuilder(text.Length);
int maxCount = 1;
int currentCount = 0;
char specialChar = ',';
foreach(char c in text)
if(c != specialChar || ++currentCount <= maxCount)
sb.Append(c);
text = sb.ToString();
This approach is not the shortest but it's efficient and you can specify the char-count to keep.
Here's a more "elegant" way using LINQ:
int commasFound = 0; int maxCommas = 1;
text = new string(text.Where(c => c != ',' || ++commasFound <= maxCommas).ToArray());
I don't like it because it requires to modify a variable from a query, so it's causing a side-effect.
You could write a function like the following one that would split the string into two sections based on the location of what you were searching (via the String.Split() method) for and it would only remove matches from the second section (using String.Replace()) :
public static string RemoveAllButFirst(string s, string stuffToRemove)
{
// Check if the stuff to replace exists and if not, return the original string
var locationOfStuff = s.IndexOf(stuffToRemove);
if (locationOfStuff < 0)
{
return s;
}
// Calculate where to pull the first string from and then replace the rest of the string
var splitLocation = locationOfStuff + stuffToRemove.Length;
return s.Substring(0, splitLocation) + (s.Substring(splitLocation)).Replace(stuffToRemove,"");
}
You could simply call it by using :
var output = RemoveAllButFirst(input,",");
A prettier approach might actually involve building an extension method that handled this a bit more cleanly :
public static class StringExtensions
{
public static string RemoveAllButFirst(this string s, string stuffToRemove)
{
// Check if the stuff to replace exists and if not, return the
// original string
var locationOfStuff = s.IndexOf(stuffToRemove);
if (locationOfStuff < 0)
{
return s;
}
// Calculate where to pull the first string from and then replace the rest of the string
var splitLocation = locationOfStuff + stuffToRemove.Length;
return s.Substring(0, splitLocation) + (s.Substring(splitLocation)).Replace(stuffToRemove,"");
}
}
which would be called via :
var output = input.RemoveAllButFirst(",");
You can see a working example of it here.
Regular expressions are elegant, right?
Regex.Replace("Eats, shoots, and leaves.", @"(?<=,.*),", "");
This replaces every comma, as long as there is a comma before it, with nothing.
(Actually, it's probably not elegant - it may only be one line of code, but it may also be O(n^2)...)
If you don't deal with large strings and you reaaaaaaly like Linq oneliners:
public static string KeepFirstOccurence (this string @string, char @char)
{
var index = @string.IndexOf(@char);
return String.Concat(String.Concat(@string.TakeWhile(x => @string.IndexOf(x) < index + 1)), String.Concat(@string.SkipWhile(x=>@string.IndexOf(x) < index)).Replace(@char.ToString(), ""));
}
static string KeepFirstOccurance(this string str, char c)
{
int charposition = str.IndexOf(c);
return str.Substring(0, charposition + 1) +
str.Substring(charposition, str.Length - charposition)
.Replace(c, ' ').Trim();
}
Pretty short with Linq; split string into chars, keep distinct set and join back to a string.
text = string.Join("", text.Select(c => c).Distinct());
