Making dashes consistent in textfile

Question

I notice the files I am importing in had inconsistent dashes, one dash is longer than the order, I want to make all dashes consistent,

I know you can use regex.replace

code = Regex.Replace( code, " something", '-')

Vulpes · Answer

For an ordinary text file, the regex to replace all occurrences of ndash and mdash by a hyphen would be: code = Regex.Replace( code, @"(\u2013|\u2014)", "-" );

David Smith · Answer

Sorry forgetting back so late, its not an html file, its a text file. What the regex for the textfile

Vulpes · Answer

Sorry, if it is an HTML file rather than an ordinary text file, then I agree that he'll need to replace the HTML character entities themselves by a hyphen. The regex to do that would be: code = Regex.Replace( code, @"&(ndash|mdash|#8211|#8212|#x2013|#x2014);", "-" );

Sam Hobbs · Answer

If the HTML uses c haracter entities then the HTML will not have the character in it. Many times in HTML a space character is specified using   instead of the space character. If the HTML has &mdash; and &ndash; in it then searching for " \u2013|\u2014 " will not work; at least not for those occurrences.

Vulpes · Answer

The escape sequences which I've used do in fact coincide with those HTML character entities - the latter are just the decimal equivalents of the hex codepoints. However, AFAIK, '\u' followed by the hex codepoint is the only way to numerically express a character outside the ASCII range in .NET regular expressions.

Sam Hobbs · Answer

If the files are HTML files then the dashes might be the "Character entities" &mdash; and &ndash;. Other representations are &#8212; and &#8211;. If so then the escape sequences suggested by Vulpes would not work.

Vulpes · Answer

Well, the en-dash has a code point of U+2013 and the em-dash as a codepoint of U+2014. Other commonly used dashes include the figure dash (U+2012) and the horizontal bar(U+2015). However, the character you used in your first post was the hyphen U+002D or ASCII 45. To replace either of the first four with a hyphen would require this line: code = Regex.Replace( code, @"(\u2012|\u2013|\u2014|\u2015)", "-" );

David Smith · Answer

I think there is an en-dash and em-dash. I want to replace the longer dash with the shorter dash. I don't know how else to do it.

Vulpes · Answer

You can use Regex.Replace (or possibly String.Replace) but you have to know what you're replacing. In other words what is the Unicode codepoint for the dash (or hyphen) that you want to replace? There must be at least 10 possibilities.

Making dashes consistent in textfile

Answers (9)