I have 5 strings, let’s call them
EarthStringFireStringWindStringWaterStringHeartString
All of them can have varying length, any of them can be empty, or can be very long (but never null).
These 5 strings are very good friends, and every weekend they are concatenated to form a result string using this c# statement
ResultString = EarthString + FireString + WindString + WaterString + HeartString
Depending on the values of these strings, sometimes (only sometimes), ResultString will contain “Captain Planet” as a substring.
My question is, how do I manipulate each of the 5 strings before they are concatenated, so that when they are combined, “Captain Planet” will never appear as a substring in the resultant string?
The only way I can think of right now is to examine each character in each string, in sequential order, but that seems very tedious. Since each of the 5 good friends strings can be of any length, examining the characters individually will also require some kind of concatenation before we can determine whether any character need to be dropped.
Edit: The resultant string is a filtered version of the 5 strings concatenated together, all the other content remain the same except the “Captain Planet” string is dropped. Yes, i’m looking for a solution which allows the 5 strings to be manipulated before concatenation. (this is actually a simplification of a bigger programming problem i’m encountering). Thanks guys.
If you want to do it pre-concat you could
Assign the start and end of each string a numeric value based on the portion of “CaptainPlanet” they contein. Ex: if Air = “net the big captain” then it would get 3 for a start value and 7 for an end value. to determine if you could concat 2 values safely you would just check to see if the end of the left string + start of the right string were not equal to the total length of “CaptainPlanet”. If you had very large strings this would allow you to inspect just the first x and last x characters of the string to compute the start/end value.
This solution doesn’t account for short strings like ei air = “Cap” , earth =”tain” and fire=”Planet”. In that case you would need to have a special case for tokens that are shorter than the length of “CaptainPlanet” For those.