CODEWITHSUNDEEP
stringreplace
Fredrik Gunne
Fredrik Gunne

Reputation: 55

Replace character with a safe character and vice-versa

Here's my problem:

I need to store sentences "somewhere" (it doesn't matter where). The sentences must not contain spaces. When I extract the sentences from that "somewhere", I need to restore the spaces.

So, before storing the sentence "I am happy" I could replace the spaces with a safe character, such as &. In C#:

theString.Replace(' ', '&');

This would yield 'I&am&happy'.

And when retrieving the sentence, I would to the reverse:

theString.Replace('&', ' ');

But what if the original sentence already contains the '&' character?

Say I would do the same thing with the sentence 'I am happy & healthy'. With the design above, the string would come back as 'I am happy healthy', since the '&' char has been replaced with a space. (Of course, I could change the & character to a more unlikely symbol, such as ¤, but I want this to be bullet proof)

I used to know how to solve this, but I forgot how.

Any ideas?

Thanks! Fredrik

Upvotes: 1

Views: 197

Answers (1)

GolezTrol
GolezTrol

Reputation: 116140

Maybe you can use url encoding (percent encoding) as an inspiration.

Characters that are not valid in a url are escaped by writing %XX where XX is a numeric code that represents the character. The % sign itself can also be escaped in the same way, so that way you never run into problems when translating it back to the original string.

There are probably other similar encodings, and for your own application you can use an & just as well as a %, but by using an existing encoding like this, you can probably also find existing functions to do the encoding and decoding for you.

Upvotes: 1

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