How do I strip non-alphanumeric characters (including spaces) from a string?
In your regex, you have excluded the spaces from being matched (and you haven't used Regex.Replace()
which I had overlooked completely...):
result = Regex.Replace("Hello there(hello#)", @"[^A-Za-z0-9]+", "");
should work. The +
makes the regex a bit more efficient by matching more than one consecutive non-alphanumeric character at once instead of one by one.
If you want to keep non-ASCII letters/digits, too, use the following regex:
@"[^\p{L}\p{N}]+"
which leaves
BonjourmesélèvesGutenMorgenliebeSchüler
instead of
BonjourmeslvesGutenMorgenliebeSchler
You can use Linq to filter out required characters:
String source = "Hello there(hello#)";
// "Hellotherehello"
String result = new String(source
.Where(ch => Char.IsLetterOrDigit(ch))
.ToArray());
Or
String result = String.Concat(source
.Where(ch => Char.IsLetterOrDigit(ch)));
And so you have no need in regular expressions.
Or you can do this too:
public static string RemoveNonAlphanumeric(string text)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(text.Length);
for (int i = 0; i < text.Length; i++)
{
char c = text[i];
if (c >= 'a' && c <= 'z' || c >= 'A' && c <= 'Z' || c >= '0' && c <= '9')
sb.Append(text[i]);
}
return sb.ToString();
}
Usage:
string text = SomeClass.RemoveNonAlphanumeric("text LaLa (lol) á ñ $ 123 ٠١٢٣٤");
//text: textLaLalol123