Checking for brackets and removing them

Question

I have actually misunderstood the issue originally,

Basically I have checks to see if there is an error, and to check for certain horrible characters that will break it, however this will not work with brackets, i need to basically check if there are ANY brackets within the string before passing it through SQL and if there are, remove them outright from the string.

for example say I have a string that looks like

[I am a magical string with super powers!){

I wish to remove all of these horrible brackets!

 if (compiler.Parser.GetErrors().Count == 0)
        {
            AstNode root = compiler.Parse(phrase.ToLower());
            if (compiler.Parser.GetErrors().Count == 0)
            {
                try
                {
                    fTextSearch = SearchGrammar.ConvertQuery(root, SearchGrammar.TermType.Inflectional);
                }
                catch
                {
                    fTextSearch = phrase;
                }
            }
            else
            {
                fTextSearch = phrase;
            }
        }
        else
        {
            fTextSearch = phrase;
        }

        string[] errorChars = errorChars = new string[]
        {
            "'",
            "&"
        };

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        string[] splitString = fTextSearch.Split(errorChars, StringSplitOptions.None);

        int numNewCharactersAdded = 0;
        foreach (string itm in splitString)
        {
            sb.Append(itm); //append string
            if (fTextSearch.Length > (sb.Length - numNewCharactersAdded))
            {
                sb.Append(fTextSearch[sb.Length - numNewCharactersAdded]); //append splitting character
                sb.Append(fTextSearch[sb.Length - numNewCharactersAdded - 1]); //append it again
                numNewCharactersAdded++;
            }
        }

        string newString = sb.ToString();

        //Union with the full text search
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(fTextSearch))
            {
                sql.AppendLine("UNION");
                sql.AppendLine(commonClause);
                sql.AppendLine(string.Format("AND CONTAINS(nt.text, '{0}', LANGUAGE 'English')", newString));
            }

Answer 1

this is one way to do it. You can make it more sophisticated by having a set of characters passed in and then testing for those characters rather than hard coding for the brackets.

var someString = "[Hello"
if(someString.contains("["))
{
    someString.Replace("[","");
}
if (someString.Contains("]"))
{ 
    someString.Replace("]","");
}

Answer 2

If I understand you right, you just want to remove the brackets if they are not matching.

This will accomplish that:

    public string MatchPair(string input, string item1, string item2)
    {
        var ix1 = input.IndexOf(item1);
        var ix2 = input.IndexOf(item2);

        if ((ix1 != -1) && (ix2 != -1))
        {
            return input;
        }

        if (ix1 == -1)
        {
            return this.CutString(input, ix2, item2);
        }

        if (ix2 == -1)
        {
            return this.CutString(input, ix1, item1);
        }

        return string.Empty;
    }

    public string CutString(string input, int ix, string item)
    {
        string left = input.Substring(0, ix);
        string right = input.Substring(ix + item.Length);

        return left + right;
    }

Here is some testdata that I used:

        var str1 = "[hello]";
        var str2 = "[hello";
        var str3 = "hel]lo";
        var str4 = "hel[lo";

        var res1 = this.MatchPair(str1, "[", "]");
        var res2 = this.MatchPair(str2, "[", "]");
        var res3 = this.MatchPair(str3, "[", "]");
        var res4 = this.MatchPair(str4, "[", "]");