Cleaning a string

[Cudabean]

I'm reading in a string from a database, but there are non-printing characters that are being read in that cause problems elsewhere.

I thought it was just a newline, but the following didn't work:

string theString = "junk read in from database";
theString.Replace("\n", "");

//This didn't work either:
theString.Replace(Environment.NewLine, "");

Since those don't work, I can only assume that there are other types of characters in the string. Is there a simple way to fix the string, or do I just need to write a loop going through the string one character at a time? What about regexp?

cudabean

[Pirate]

So you want to replace white spaces with newline chars ? If so , then try this :

string theString = "junk read in from database";
theString =theString.Replace(" ",Environment.NewLine); 

[wey97]

You may need to replace carriage returns and line feeds both.

theString.Replace("\r", "");
theString.Replace("\n", "");

[Cudabean]

Thanks all responders. I found this did the job nicely:

public static String filter(String userInput) 
		{
			Regex re = new Regex("([^A-Za-z0-9@.' _-]+)");
			String filtered = re.Replace(userInput, "");
			return filtered;
		}

It get's rid of more than just any non-printing character, but that was OK in this instance. The regular expression above only allows the character ranges that are listed and kills everything else.

cudabean