Solve real coding problems
Articles about building, parsing, searching, formatting, and converting strings in C#. The string type holds text values (i.e. “hello world”).
Let’s say you want to parse a comma-separated string into a list of integers. For example, you have “1,2,3” and you want to parse it into [1,2,3]. This is different from parsing CSV with rows of comma-separated values. This is more straightforward. You can use string.Split(“,”) to get the individual values and then convert them … Read more
The simplest way to remove non-alphanumeric characters from a string is to use regex: Note: Don’t pass in a null, otherwise you’ll get an exception. Regex is the simplest approach for solving this problem, but it’s also the slowest. If you’re concerned about the performance take a look at the performance section below. This example … Read more
Here’s the simplest way to efficiently trim a UTF-8 string to the specified number of bytes: A UTF-8 string can have a mix of characters between 1 to 4 bytes. When you only take part of the byte array, you may end up cutting multi-byte chars in half, which then get replaced with the replacement … Read more
There are many different scenarios where you might want to check a string against a list of substrings. Perhaps you’re dealing with messy exception handling and have to compare the exception message against a list of known error messages to determine if the error is transient or not. When you need to check a string … Read more
Normally when you want to join strings using a separator, you’d use string.Join(). However, the problem with string.Join() is it doesn’t ignore nulls or empty strings. Take a look at the following examples: If you want to filter out nulls and empty strings, you can filter the list of strings yourself and pass it into … Read more
The fastest and simplest way to remove a set of characters from a string is to use StringBuilder + List<char>, like this: I compared this with three other approaches. I did 100,000 iterations with a string with 2500 characters and a list of 15 characters to remove. This StringBuilder approach is almost 2x faster than … Read more
Let’s say you have a list of HTTP status codes that you read in when the service starts up (perhaps from appsettings.json or from the database). Whenever you send an HTTP request, you want to check if the returned status code is in this list of status code. To make things more efficient, you want … Read more
Interpolated strings have the following structure: {variable:format}. Typically you exclude the format, so they normally look like this: $”My name is {name}”. Here’s how to use format strings with an interpolated string: This outputs the following: This is the equivalent of using string.Format() like this: As you can see, specifying a format string with an … Read more
Using string.Format() is error prone and can lead to runtime exceptions. Using string interpolation prevents these problems (and it’s more readable). This article shows the two common mistakes you can make when using string.Format(), resulting in runtime exceptions, and shows how you can use string interpolation to prevent these problems. 1 – FormatException: Format string … Read more
This article shows code for converting a hex string to a byte array, unit tests, and a speed comparison. First, this diagram shows the algorithm for converting a hex string to a byte array. To convert a hex string to a byte array, you need to loop through the hex string and convert two characters … Read more
You can use Convert.ChangeType() to convert from a string to any type, like this: Normally you’d call the specific type converter method, like Convert.ToBoolean(“true”). However, sometimes it makes sense to use the generalized type converter method – Convert.ChangeType() – instead of hardcoding the calls to specific type converter methods. I’ll show an example of when … Read more
In regex, capturing groups give you a way to save text and refer to it later. Capturing groups can be named, and referred to by their name. When they aren’t named, you refer to them by their index number. In this article, I’ll show how to use named capturing groups by solving the problem of … Read more
