string replace using a List

Question

I have a List of words I want to ignore like this one :

public List<String> ignoreList = new List<String>()
        {
            "North",
            "South",
            "East",
            "West"
        };

For a given string, say "14th Avenue North" I want to be able to remove the "North" part, so basically a function that would return "14th Avenue " when called.

I feel like there is something I should be able to do with a mix of LINQ, regex and replace, but I just can't figure it out.

The bigger picture is, I'm trying to write an address matching algorithm. I want to filter out words like "Street", "North", "Boulevard", etc. before I use the Levenshtein algorithm to evaluate the similarity.

Answer 1

How about this:

string.Join(" ", text.Split().Where(w => !ignoreList.Contains(w)));

or for .Net 3:

string.Join(" ", text.Split().Where(w => !ignoreList.Contains(w)).ToArray());

Note that this method splits the string up into individual words so it only removes whole words. That way it will work properly with addresses like Northampton Way #123 that string.Replace can't handle.

Answer 2

Regex r = new Regex(string.Join("|", ignoreList.Select(s => Regex.Escape(s)).ToArray()));
string s = "14th Avenue North";
s = r.Replace(s, string.Empty);

Answer 3

Something like this should work:

string FilterAllValuesFromIgnoreList(string someStringToFilter)
{
  return ignoreList.Aggregate(someStringToFilter, (str, filter)=>str.Replace(filter, ""));
}

Answer 4

What's wrong with a simple for loop?

string street = "14th Avenue North";
foreach (string word in ignoreList)
{
    street = street.Replace(word, string.Empty);
}

Answer 5

If you know that the list of word contains only characters that do not need escaping inside a regular expression then you can do this:

string s = "14th Avenue North";
Regex regex = new Regex(string.Format(@"\b({0})\b",
                        string.Join("|", ignoreList.ToArray())));
s = regex.Replace(s, "");

Result:

14th Avenue 

If there are special characters you will need to fix two things:

• Use Regex.Escape on each element of ignore list.
• The word-boundary \b will not match a whitespace followed by a symbol or vice versa. You may need to check for whitespace (or other separating characters such as punctuation) using lookaround assertions instead.

Here's how to fix these two problems:

Regex regex = new Regex(string.Format(@"(?<= |^)({0})(?= |$)",
    string.Join("|", ignoreList.Select(x => Regex.Escape(x)).ToArray())));

Answer 6

If it's a short string as in your example, you can just loop though the strings and replace one at a time. If you want to get fancy you can use the LINQ Aggregate method to do it:

address = ignoreList.Aggregate(address, (a, s) => a.Replace(s, String.Empty));

If it's a large string, that would be slow. Instead you can replace all strings in a single run through the string, which is much faster. I made a method for that in this answer.

Answer 7

LINQ makes this easy and readable. This requires normalized data though, particularly in that it is case-sensitive.

List<string> ignoreList = new List<string>()
{
    "North",
    "South",
    "East",
    "West"
};    

string s = "123 West 5th St"
        .Split(' ')  // Separate the words to an array
        .ToList()    // Convert array to TList<>
        .Except(ignoreList) // Remove ignored keywords
        .Aggregate((s1, s2) => s1 + " " + s2); // Reconstruct the string

Answer 8

public static string Trim(string text)
{
   var rv = text;
   foreach (var ignore in ignoreList)
      rv = rv.Replace(ignore, "");
   return rv;
}

Updated For Gabe

---

public static string Trim(string text)
{
   var rv = "";
   var words = text.Split(" ");
   foreach (var word in words)
   {
      var present = false;
      foreach (var ignore in ignoreList)
         if (word == ignore)
            present = true;
      if (!present)
         rv += word;
   }
   return rv;
}

Answer 9

If you have a list, I think you're going to have to touch all the items. You could create a massive RegEx with all your ignore keywords and replace to String.Empty.

Here's a start:

(^|\s+)(North|South|East|West){1,2}(ern)?(\s+|$)

If you have a single RegEx for ignore words, you can do a single replace for each phrase you want to pass to the algorithm.

Answer 10

Why not juts Keep It Simple ?

public static string Trim(string text)
{
   var rv = text.trim();
   foreach (var ignore in ignoreList) {
      if(tv.EndsWith(ignore) {
      rv = rv.Replace(ignore, string.Empty);
   }
  }
   return rv;
}

Answer 11

You can do this using and expression if you like, but it's easier to turn it around than using a Aggregate. I would do something like this:

string s = "14th Avenue North"
ignoreList.ForEach(i => s = s.Replace(i, ""));
//result is "14th Avenue "