How to remove one char from a string? - c#

Good day, I asked this question before but i wasn't specific for what I apologize. I'm making a simple windForms Chess Game using picture Boxes as each cell. According to the rules, the King can't move if the cell is targeted by an enemy piece. To implement this rule I'm using pictureBox.Tag property and assign a string to it. If a piece targets it I use pictureBox1.Tag += "D" D as in Danger. So if two pieces are targeting it the Tag will become "DD". My question is this - How do I remove just one 'D' from my string ? Can I use -= operator or something similar?

Assuming:
string a = "ABCDEFG";
To remove the first 'D':
a = a.Remove(a.IndexOf('D'), 1);
To remove all 'D's
a = new string(a.Where(c => c != 'D').ToArray());
Although I would recommend looking at object oriented approach. Then you could easily store references to the actual chessmen who target a spot, hence easy to modify (no need to recalculate).

While there ware ways to do what you're trying to do, what you really want to do is ditch string manipulation, and use something else. For instance, create a whole class for this square meta-information. Something like
public class SquareInfo
{
public int Danger; //the number of pieces that can move to this square.
//... Any other information about the square you want.
}
Then you could grab the tag as:
var myInfo = (SquareInfo)myBox.Tag;
if (myInfo.Danger > 2)
{
//do something
}
And so on.

I think this would solve your problem
public void Remove (PictureBox pb){
if (pb.Tag.ToString().Length > 1) {
// Greater than 1 because we need to keep one D in case of DD,
String temp = pb.Tag.ToString();
pb.Tag = temp.Substring(0, temp.Length - 2);
}
else
pb.Tag = "D";
// Tag equals D because if there is only one D, it won't be deleted
}

You can use a regex to specify to remove just one instance of a character:
Regex regex = new Regex(Regex.Escape("D"));
string output = regex.Replace("ABCDDEFG", string.Empty, 1);

Simply use the Replace method, replacing your character (as a string) with an empty string:
string s = "Daddy comes back";
s = s.Replace("D", string.Empty); // Replace ALL D'
Console.WriteLine(s);
Alternatively, if you already know the index of the characters to be removed, or if you need to remove a single character, consider using Substring methods.
s = s.Substring(i, i+1); // Remove the character at position i
Note that a C# string is immutable: in both cases, a new string instance is returned.

Related

How to strip a string from the point a hyphen is found within the string C#

I'm currently trying to strip a string of data that is may contain the hyphen symbol.
E.g. Basic logic:
string stringin = "test - 9894"; OR Data could be == "test";
if (string contains a hyphen "-"){
Strip stringin;
output would be "test" deleting from the hyphen.
}
Console.WriteLine(stringin);
The current C# code i'm trying to get to work is shown below:
string Details = "hsh4a - 8989";
var regexItem = new Regex("^[^-]*-?[^-]*$");
string stringin;
stringin = Details.ToString();
if (regexItem.IsMatch(stringin)) {
stringin = stringin.Substring(0, stringin.IndexOf("-") - 1); //Strip from the ending chars and - once - is hit.
}
Details = stringin;
Console.WriteLine(Details);
But pulls in an Error when the string does not contain any hyphen's.
How about just doing this?
stringin.Split('-')[0].Trim();
You could even specify the maximum number of substrings using overloaded Split constructor.
stringin.Split('-', 1)[0].Trim();
Your regex is asking for "zero or one repetition of -", which means that it matches even if your input does NOT contain a hyphen. Thereafter you do this
stringin.Substring(0, stringin.IndexOf("-") - 1)
Which gives an index out of range exception (There is no hyphen to find).
Make a simple change to your regex and it works with or without - ask for "one or more hyphens":
var regexItem = new Regex("^[^-]*-+[^-]*$");
here -------------------------^
It seems that you want the (sub)string starting from the dash ('-') if original one contains '-' or the original string if doesn't have dash.
If it's your case:
String Details = "hsh4a - 8989";
Details = Details.Substring(Details.IndexOf('-') + 1);
I wouldn't use regex for this case if I were you, it makes the solution much more complex than it can be.
For string I am sure will have no more than a couple of dashes I would use this code, because it is one liner and very simple:
string str= entryString.Split(new [] {'-'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];
If you know that a string might contain high amount of dashes, it is not recommended to use this approach - it will create high amount of different strings, although you are looking just for the first one. So, the solution would look like something like this code:
int firstDashIndex = entryString.IndexOf("-");
string str = firstDashIndex > -1? entryString.Substring(0, firstDashIndex) : entryString;
you don't need a regex for this. A simple IndexOf function will give you the index of the hyphen, then you can clean it up from there.
This is also a great place to start writing unit tests as well. They are very good for stuff like this.
Here's what the code could look like :
string inputString = "ho-something";
string outPutString = inputString;
var hyphenIndex = inputString.IndexOf('-');
if (hyphenIndex > -1)
{
outPutString = inputString.Substring(0, hyphenIndex);
}
return outPutString;

How to search for specific char in an array and how to then manipulate that index in c#

Okay, so I'm creating a hangman game and everything functions so far, including what I'm TRYING to do in the question.
But it feels like there is a much more efficient method of obtaining the char that is also easier to manipulate the index.
protected static void alphabetSelector(string activeWordAlphabet)
{
char[] activeWord = activeWordAlphabet.ToCharArray();
string activeWordString = new string(activeWord);
Console.WriteLine("If you'd like to guess a letter, enter the letter. \n
If you'd like to guess the word, please type in the word. --- testing answer{0}",
activeWordString);
//Console.WriteLine("For Testing Purposes ONLY");
String chosenLetter = Console.ReadLine();
//Char[] letterFinder = Array.FindAll(activeWord, s => s.Equals(chosenLetter));
//string activeWordString = new string(activeWord);
foreach (char letter in activeWord);
{
if(activeWordString.Contains(chosenLetter))
{
Console.WriteLine("{0}", activeWordString);
Console.ReadLine();
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("errrr...wrong!");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
I have broken up the code in some areas to prevent the reader from having to scroll sideways. If this is bothersome, please let me know and I'll leave it in the future.
So this code will successfully print out the 'word' whenever I select the correct letter from the random word (I have the console print the actual word so that I can test it successfully each time). It will also print 'wrong' when I choose a letter NOT in the string.
But I feel like I should be able to use the
Array.FindAll(activeWord, ...)
functionality or some other way. But every time I try and reorder the arguments, it gives me all kinds of different errors and tells me to redo my arguments.
So, if you can look at this and find an easier method of searching the actual array for the user-selected 'letter', please help!! Even if it's not using the Array.FindAll method!!
Edit
Okay, it seems like there's some confusion with what I've done and why I've done it.
I'm ONLY printing the word inside that 'if' statement to test and make sure that the foreach{if{}} will actually work to find the char inside the string. But I ultimately need to be able to provide a placeholder for a char that is successfully found, as well as being able to 'cross out' the letter (from the alphabet list not shown here).
It's hangman - surely you guys know what I'm needing it to do. It has to keep track of which letters are left in the word, which letters have been chosen, as well as which letters are left in the entire alphabet.
I'm a 4-day old newb when it comes to programming, so please. . . I'm only doing what I know to do and when I get errors, I comment things out and write more until I find something that works.
Take a look at this demo I put together for you: https://dotnetfiddle.net/eP9TQM
I'd suggest creating a second string for the display string. Use a StringBuilder, and you can replace the characters in it at specific indices while creating the fewest number of stringobjects in the process.
string word = "your word or phrase here";
//Initialize a new StringBuilder that will display the word with placeholders.
StringBuilder display = new StringBuilder(word.Length); //You know the display word is the same length as the original word
display.Append('-', word.Length); //Fill it with placeholders.
So now you have your phrase/word, and a string builder full of characters that need to be discovered.
Go ahead and convert the display StringBuilder to a string that you can check on each pass to see if it equals your word:
var displayString = display.ToString();
//Loop until the display string is equal to the word
while (!displayString.Equals(word))
{
//Inside here your logic will follow.
}
So you are basically looping until the person answers here. You could of course go back and add logic to limit the number of attempts, or whatever you desire as an alternate exit strategy.
Inside this logic, you will check if they guessed a letter or a word based on how many characters they entered.
If they guessed a word, the logic is simple. Check if the guessed word is the same as the hidden word. If it is, then you break the loop and they are done. Otherwise, guessing loops back around.
If they guessed a letter, the logic is pretty straightforward, but more involved.
First get the character they guessed, just because it may be easier to work with this way.
char guess = input[0];
Now, look over the word for instances of that character:
//Look for instances of the character in the word.
for (int i = 0; i < word.Length; ++i)
{
//If the current index in the word matches their guess, then update the display.
if (char.ToUpperInvariant(word[i]) == char.ToUpperInvariant(guess))
display[i] = word[i];
}
The comments above should explain the idea here.
Update your displayString at the bottom of the loop so that it will check against the hidden word again:
displayString = display.ToString();
That's really all you need to do here. No fancy Linq needed.
Ok your code is really confusing, even with your edit.
First, why these 2 lines of code since activeWordAlphabet is a string :
char[] activeWord = activeWordAlphabet.ToCharArray();
string activeWordString = new string(activeWord);
Then you do your foreach.
For the word "FooBar", if the player types 'F', you will print
FooBar
FooBar
FooBar
FooBar
FooBar
FooBar
How does this help you in anything?
I think you have to review your algorithm. The string type have the function you need
int chosenLetterPosition = activeWord.IndexOf(chosenLetter, alreadyFoundPosition)
alreadyFoundPosition is an int from where the function will search the letter
IndexOf() returns -1 if the letter is not find or a positive number.
You can save this position with your letter in a dictionary to use it again as your new 'alreadyFoundPosition' if the chosenLetter is already in the dictionary
This is my answer. Because I don't have a lot of tasks today :)
class Letter
{
public bool ischosen { get; set; }
public char value { get; set; }
}
class LetterList
{
public LetterList(string word)
{
_lst = new List<Letter>();
word.ToList().ForEach(x => _lst.Add(new Letter() { value = x }));
}
public bool FindLetter(char letter)
{
var search = _lst.Where(x => x.value == letter).ToList();
search.ForEach(x=>x.ischosen=true);
return search.Count > 0 ? true : false;
}
public string NotChosen()
{
var res = "";
_lst.Where(x => !x.ischosen).ToList().ForEach(x => { res += x.value; });
return res;
}
List<Letter> _lst;
}
How to use
var abc = new LetterList("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz");
var answer = new LetterList("myanswer");
Console.WriteLine("This my question. Why? write your answer please");
char x = Console.ReadLine()[0];
if (answer.FindLetter(x))
{
Console.WriteLine("you are right!");
}
else
{
Console.WriteLine("fail");
}
abc.FindLetter(x);
Console.WriteLine("not chosen abc:{0} answer:{1}", abc.NotChosen(), answer.NotChosen());
At least we used to play this game like that when i was a child.

Getting substring between two separators in an arbitrary position

I have following string:
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
The / character is the separator between various elements in the string. I need to get the last two elements of the string. I have following code for this purpose. This works fine. Is there any faster/simpler code for this?
CODE
static void Main()
{
string component = String.Empty;
string version = String.Empty;
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(source))
{
String[] partsOfSource = source.Split('/');
if (partsOfSource != null)
{
if (partsOfSource.Length > 2)
{
component = partsOfSource[partsOfSource.Length - 2];
}
if (partsOfSource.Length > 1)
{
version = partsOfSource[partsOfSource.Length - 1];
}
}
}
Console.WriteLine(component);
Console.WriteLine(version);
Console.Read();
}
Why no regular expression? This one is fairly easy:
.*/(?<component>.*)/(?<version>.*)$
You can even label your groups so for your match all you need to do is:
component = myMatch.Groups["component"];
version = myMatch.Groups["version"];
The following should be faster, as it only scans as much of the string as it needs to to find two / and it doesn't bother splitting up the whole string:
string component = "";
string version = "";
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
int last = source.LastIndexOf('/');
if (last != -1)
{
int penultimate = source.LastIndexOf('/', last - 1);
version = source.Substring(last + 1);
component = source.Substring(penultimate + 1, last - penultimate - 1);
}
That said, as with all performance questions: profile! Try the two side-by-side with a big list of real-life inputs and see which is fastest.
(Also, this will leave empty strings rather than throw an exception if there is no slash in the input... but throw if source is null, lazy me.)
Your approach is the most suitable one given that your are looking for substrings at a particular index. A LINQ expression to do the same in this case will likely not improve the code or its readability.
For reference, there is some great information from Microsoft here on working with strings and LINQ. In particular see the article here which covers some examples with both LINQ and RegEx.
EDIT: +1 For Matt's named group within RegEx approach... that's the nicest solution I've seen.
Your code mostly looks fine. A couple of points to note:
String.Split() will never return null, so you don't need the null check on it.
If the source string has fewer than two / characters, how would you deal with that? (The Original Post was updated to address this)
Do you really want to just output empty strings if your source string is null or empty (or invalid)? If you have specific expectations about the nature of the input, you may want to consider failing fast when those expectations are not met.
You could try something like this but I doubt it would be much faster. You could do some meassurements with System.Diagnostics.StopWatch to see if you feel the need.
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
int index1 = source.LastIndexOf('/');
string last = source.Substring(index1 + 1);
string substring = source.Substring(0, index1);
int index2 = substring.LastIndexOf('/');
string secondLast = substring.Substring(index2 + 1);
I would try
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
var components = source.Split('/').Reverse().Take(2);
String last = string.Empty;
var enumerable = components as string[] ?? components.ToArray();
if (enumerable.Count() == 2)
last = enumerable.FirstOrDefault();
var secondLast = enumerable.LastOrDefault();
Hope this will help
you can retrieve the last two words using the process as below:
string source = "Test/Company/Business/Department/Logs.tvs/v1";
String[] partsOfSource = source.Split('/');
if(partsOfSourch.length>2)
for(int i=partsOfSourch.length-2;i<=partsOfSource.length-1;i++)
console.writeline(partsOfSource[i]);

best way to turn a post title into an URL in c#

I was wondering which is the best way to turn a string (e.g. a post title) into a descriptive URL.
the simplest way that comes to mind is by using a regex, such in:
public static Regex regex = new Regex(
"\\W+",
RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
| RegexOptions.CultureInvariant
| RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace
| RegexOptions.Compiled
);
string result = regex.Replace(InputText,"_");
which turns
"my first (yet not so bad) cupcake!! :) .//\."
into
my_first_yet_not_so_bad_cupcake_
then I can strip the last "_" and check it against my db and see if it's yet present. in that case I would add a trailing number to make it unique and recheck.
I could use it in, say
http://myblogsite.xom/posts/my_first_yet_not_so_bad_cupcake
but, is this way safe? should i check other things (like the length of the string)
is there any other, better method you prefer?
thanks
Here's what I do. regStripNonAlpha removes all the non-alpha or "-" characters. Trim() removes trailing and leading spaces (so we don't end up with dashes on either side). regSpaceToDash converts spaces (or runs of spaces) into a single dash. This has worked well for me.
static Regex regStripNonAlpha = new Regex(#"[^\w\s\-]+", RegexOptions.Compiled);
static Regex regSpaceToDash = new Regex(#"[\s]+", RegexOptions.Compiled);
public static string MakeUrlCompatible(string title)
{
return regSpaceToDash.Replace(
regStripNonAlpha.Replace(title, string.Empty).Trim(), "-");
}
string result = regex.Replace(InputText,"-");
instead of under score put hypen (-) that would give added advantage for Google search engine.
See below post for more details
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
Here's a method I wrote not too long ago that takes a string and formats it to a permalink.
private string FormatPermalink(string title)
{
StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
title = title.Trim();
bool lastOneChanged = false;
for (int i = 0; i < title.Length; i++)
{
char c = title[i];
if (!char.IsLetterOrDigit(c))
{
c = '_';
if (lastOneChanged)
{
continue;
}
lastOneChanged = true;
}
else
{
lastOneChanged = false;
}
result.Append(c);
}
if (result[result.Length - 1] == '_') //if last one is underscore, remove
{
result = result.Remove(result.Length - 1, 1);
}
return result.ToString();
}
This takes into account special characters as well, so if the title has a special character, it just ignores it and moves on to the next one.
You could look into a URL re-writing HTTPModule. There are many examples on the net.
Once implemented in your web.config you simply specify the regular expression to map to the "real" page using the SEO friendly name
<!-- Rule 1: example... "/admin/somepage" redirects to..."/UI/Forms/Admin/frmPage.aspx" -->
<add key="^/admin/(.*)" value="/UI/Forms/Admin/frm$1.aspx" />
If you want to avoid doing this yourself, an HttpModule like http://urlrewriter.net/
could help. It's pretty good but requires a bit setting up.
Personally, I'd couple your special character removing with a date so your example would look like:
http://myblogsite.xom/posts/2009/04/03/my_first_yet_not_so_bad_cupcake
That way, if you content with the same title, it gets differentiated by date too. I see this often on some blogs I visit where they use "Five Random Things Make A Post" a lot (but not within the same day).

String functions

I want to search for a given string, within another string (Ex. find if "something" exists inside "something like this". How can I do the following? :
Know the position in which "something" is located (in the curr. ex. this is = 0.
Extract everything to the left or to the right, up to the char. found (see 1).
Extract a substring beggining where the sought string was found, all the way to X amount of chars (in Visual Basic 6/VBA I would use the Mid function).
string searched = "something like this";
1.
int pos = searched.IndexOf("something");
2.
string start = searched.Substring(0, pos);
string endstring = searched.Substring(pos);
3.
string mid = searched.Substring(pos, x);
Have you looked at the String.SubString() method? You can use the IndexOf() method to see if the substring exists first.
Take a look at the System.String member functions, in particular the IndexOf method.
Use int String.IndexOf(String).
I would do something like this:
string s = "I have something like this";
//question No. 1
int pos = s.IndexOf("something");
//quiestion No. 2
string[] separator = {"something"};
string[] leftAndRightEntries = s.Split(separator, StringSplitOptions.None);
//question No. 3
int x = pos + 10;
string substring = s.Substring(pos, x);
I would avoid using Split, as it's designed to give you multiple results. I would stick with the code in the first example, though the second block should actually read...
string start = searched.Substring(0, pos);
string endstring;
if(pos < searched.Length - 1)
endstring = searched.Substring(pos + "something".Length);
else
endstring = string.Empty
The key difference is accounting for the length of the string to find (hence the rather odd-looking "something".Length, as this example is designed for you to be able to plop in your own variable).

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