Question

I have a dynamic String value which may contain values like this

"Apple   ,Banana, , , ,  Mango  ,Strawberry  , " 

I would like to filter this string like

"Apple,Banana,Mango,Strawberry". 

I have tried with the following code and it works.

Is there any better approach to achieve the same in C#(.NET 2.0)?

/// <summary>
/// Convert "Comma Separated String" to "Comma Separated String"
/// </summary>
/// <param name="strWithComma">String having values separated by comma</param>
/// <returns>String separated with comma</returns>
private String CommaSeparatedString(String strWithComma)
{
    String rtn = String.Empty;

    List<String> newList= new List<string>();

    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(strWithComma))
    {
        return rtn;
    }

    String[] strArray = strWithComma.Split(",".ToCharArray());


    if (strArray == null || strArray.Length == 0)
    {
        return rtn;
    }

    String tmpStr = String.Empty;
    String separator=String.Empty;
    foreach (String s in strArray)
    {
        if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
        {
            tmpStr =s.Replace(Environment.NewLine, String.Empty);
            tmpStr = tmpStr.Trim();
            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(tmpStr))
            {
                newList.Add(tmpStr);
            }
        }
    }

    if (newList != null && newList.Count > 0)
    {

        rtn = String.Join(",", newList.ToArray());
    }
    return rtn;

}

Answer 1

I believe the following should do the trick on any .NET version:

string[] TrimAll( string[] input )
{
    var result = new List<string>();
    foreach( var s in input )
        result.Add( s.Trim() );
    }
    return result.ToArray();
}

var delimiters = new [] { ",", "\t", Environment.NewLine };
string result = string.Join(",", TrimAll( input.Split( delimiters, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries ) ) );

Edit: updated to deal with white-space, tabs and newline.