Question

I have a string that contains colours in the form of “^##” where ## can be 00-99.

I wrote regex to detect and replace these colours:

Input = Regex.Replace(Input, "\^[0-9][0-9]", "");

However the compiler doesn’t seem to like \^ as a means of detecting the “^” character (gives an invalid escape code error). So how do I go about looking for the ^ character in c# regex?

Answer 1

That happens because, well, there’s no such escape sequence (\^)

You can use:

• C# verbatim strings: @"\^[0-9][0-9]"
• Two backslashes instead of one: "\\^[0-9][0-9]"

Tips:

• The character class [0-9] is equivalent to the shorthand \d
• Instead of having [0-9][0-9] you could use [0-9]{2} (or \d{2}). This helps when you have more repetitions.

References:

Character classes, Repetition