Question

I have a program where I take a date from an RSS file and attempt to convert it into a DateTime. Unfortunately, the RSS file that I have to use has a lot of spacing issues. When I parse the string I get this:

"\t\t\n\t\t4/13/2011\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t"

I want to remove all of the \t‘s and\n‘s. So far these have all failed:

finalDateString.Trim('\t');
finalDateString.Trim('\n');
finalDateString.Trim();
finalDateString.Replace("\t", "");
finalDateString.Replace("\n", "");
finalDateString.Replace(" ", "");

Every one of the commands will return the same string. Any suggestions?

(I tagged RSS in the case that there is an RSS reason for this)

Answer 1

First, you can remove all the whitespace from your string by using a 1-character regular expression:

    String finalDateTimeString = "\t\t\n\t\t4/13/2011\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t";
    Regex whitespaceRegex = new Regex("\\s");
    finalDateTimeString = whitespaceRegex.Replace(finalDateTimeString, "");

I just tested this, and it worked.

Second, I just tested calling DateTime.Parse() on your string, and it worked without even removing the whitespace. So maybe you don’t even have to do that.

    String finalDateTimeString = "\t\t\n\t\t4/13/2011\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t";
    DateTime finalDateTime = DateTime.Parse(finalDateTimeString);
    // finalDateTime.toString() == "4/13/2011 12:00:00 AM"