Removing escape sequences from strings

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JJ - 09 Jun 2007 14:45 GMT

Is there a way of checking that a line with escape sequences in it, has no
strings in it (apart from the escape sequences)?

i.e. a line with \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\r\n would have no string in it
a line with \n\t\t\t\thello\t\t\n would hve the string 'hello' in it.

In others words, is there a method of removing all escape sequences from a
string?

I've tried Regex.Unescape(string) but this doesn't not seem to remove the
sequences.
Is there a way, or do I have to try and remove all the possible excape
sequences by parsing the string?

Thanks,
JJ

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Mark Fitzpatrick - 09 Jun 2007 15:42 GMT

Have you tried just replacing them with nothing? If it's a string you could
do this like myString.Replace("\t","").Replace("\n","")

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Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Former Microsoft FrontPage MVP 199?-2006

> Is there a way of checking that a line with escape sequences in it, has no
> strings in it (apart from the escape sequences)?
[quoted text clipped - 12 lines]
> Thanks,
> JJ

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Mark Rae - 09 Jun 2007 15:46 GMT

> Is there a way of checking that a line with escape sequences in it, has no
> strings in it (apart from the escape sequences)?
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
> Is there a way, or do I have to try and remove all the possible excape
> sequences by parsing the string?

There may be a "cleverer" more efficient way of doing this, but how about:

string strEscaped = "\n\t\t\t\thello\t\t\n";
string strUnescaped = strUnescaped.Replace("\n",
"").Replace("\t","").Replace("\r","");

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JJ - 09 Jun 2007 16:04 GMT

Thats what I ended up doing (string.replace). My worry was that there seems
to be a lot of these possible escape sequences beyond the standard \r \t \n
etc. so I foolishly thought that there might be a 'built-in' method that
removes all possible sequences.

Thanks again,
John

>> Is there a way of checking that a line with escape sequences in it, has
>> no strings in it (apart from the escape sequences)?
[quoted text clipped - 15 lines]
> string strUnescaped = strUnescaped.Replace("\n",
> "").Replace("\t","").Replace("\r","");

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Mark Rae - 09 Jun 2007 16:56 GMT

> My worry was that there seems to be a lot of these possible escape
> sequences

In fact, there are only a handful:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4edbef7e(VS.80).aspx

Seems like a good candidate for a static method:

public static string StripEscape(string pstrText)
{
string strStrippedText = pstrText;

strStrippedText = strStrippedText.Replace("\t", String.Empty);
strStrippedText = strStrippedText.Replace("\n", String.Empty);

// etc

return strStrippedText;
}

Obviously, the list of escape characters may change in future versions of
C#...

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Removing escape sequences from strings

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