Question

I am attempting to do some string manipulations and I have a need to take multi-line strings and create a List<String> by splitting on \r\n so that I end up with a list of the lines found in the string.

However, after doing the Regex.Split I’m ending up with lines that have every single

" escaped with a \.

For example, a snippet of an input string is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<g2s:g2sMessage xmlns:g2s="http://www.gamingstandards.com/g2s/schemas/v1.0.3">
   <g2s:g2sBody g2s:dateTimeSent="2012-11-06T09:12:38.006-08:00" g2s:egmId="RBG_1234"
                g2s:hostId="1">
      <g2s:communications g2s:commandId="37102" g2s:dateTime="2012-11-06T09:12:38.004-08:00"
                          g2s:deviceId="1"
                          g2s:errorCode="G2S_none"

When I do the following to split this string into a List<String> using:

List<string> lines = new List<string>(Regex.Split(message, "\r\n"));

The result is:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"yes\"?>
<g2s:g2sMessage xmlns:g2s=\"http://www.gamingstandards.com/g2s/schemas/v1.0.3\">
   <g2s:g2sBody g2s:dateTimeSent=\"2012-11-06T09:12:38.006-08:00\" g2s:egmId=\"RBG_1234\"
            g2s:hostId=\"1\">
      <g2s:communications g2s:commandId=\"37102\" g2s:dateTime=\"2012-11-06T09:12:38.004-08:00\"
            g2s:deviceId=\"1\"
            g2s:errorCode=\"G2S_none\"

How would I do this without ending up with strings that have " escaped?
Is C# really escaping the characters, or is it just the way the debugger is showing the strings?

Answer 1

This is just the way that the string is displayed inside the debugger (Visual Studio, I guess?). Those backslashes aren’t really in your string. You can prove this to yourself by outputting the string to the console or to a file, and noticing that the backslashes don’t appear.