Question

i am trying to parse out a string and in some cases there is an extra ” – [some number]” at the end. for example,

instead of showing

 Technologist

it shows

Technologist - 23423

i dont want to just check or split on “-” because there are other names that do have a “-” in them

can anyone think of a clean way of removing this extra noise so:

Technologist – 23423 resolves to Technologist

Answer 1

This looks like a case regular expressions, such as @” – \d+$” in this case. Sample code:

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Tidy("Technologist - 12345");
        Tidy("No trailing stuff");
        Tidy("A-B1 - 1 - other things");
    }

    private static readonly Regex regex = new Regex(@"- \d+$");

    static void Tidy(string text)
    {
        string tidied = regex.Replace(text, "");
        Console.WriteLine("'{0}' => '{1}'", text, tidied);
    }
}

Note that this currently doesn’t spot negative numbers. If you wanted it to, you could use

new Regex(@"- -?\d+$");