Question

I have a string in the following format in a comma delimited file:

someText, "Text with, delimiter", moreText, "Text Again"

What I need to do is create a method that will look through the string, and will replace any commas inside of quoted text with a dollar sign ($).

After the method, the string will be:

someText, "Text with$ delimiter", moreText, "Text Again"

I’m not entirely good with RegEx, but would like to know how I can use regular expressions to search for a pattern (finding a comma in between quotes), and then replace that comma with the dollar sign.

Answer 1

Personally, I’d avoid regexes here – assuming that there aren’t nested quote marks, this is quite simple to write up as a for-loop, which I think will be more efficient:

var inQuotes = false;
var sb = new StringBuilder(someText.Length);

for (var i = 0; i < someText.Length; ++i)
{
    if (someText[i] == '"')
    {
        inQuotes = !inQuotes;
    }

    if (inQuotes && someText[i] == ',')
    {
        sb.Append('$');
    }
    else
    {
        sb.Append(someText[i]);
    }
}