Replacing special chars in a string with a single unique char

Question

I have a string like so:

string inputStr = "Name*&^%LastName*#@";

The following Regex will replace all the special chars with a '-'

Regex rgx = new Regex("[^a-zA-Z0-9 - _]");
someStr = rgx.Replace(someStr, "-");

That produces an output something like: Name---LastName---

How do I replace '---' with a single '-' so the output looks like this:

Name-LastName

So the question is how do I replace all the special chars with a single '-'?

Regards.

Answer 1

Try this

Regex rgx = new Regex("[^a-zA-Z0-9 \- _]+");//note - character is escaped

or

Regex rgx = new Regex("[^a-zA-Z0-9 _-]+");//or use - as last character

But this will give Name-LastName- Is this okay or..?

If you don't need - at last position you can use the following code as well. Credit goes to @MatthewStrawbridge. You can see in comments.

string someStr = rgx.Replace(inputStr, "-").TrimEnd('-');

will output Name-LastName .

Edit: As @pguardiario pointed in comments updated my answer to escape - since range( [] ) has special meaning for - character. If we need - as a literal we need to escape it or make it first or last character of the character class in order to behave as literal.