Question

I have the following string example:

\\servername\Client\Range\Product\

The servername, Client, Range, and Product vales can be anything but they simply represe t a samba share on a server.

I want to be able to take one of these paths and relace everything upto the fourth \ with a new path: for example:

\\10.0.1.1\ITClient\001\0012\ will become:

\\10.0.1.1\Archive\001\0012\

All the paths that I get will follow the same start pattern \\servername\Client\, using C# how can I replace everything in the string upto the 4th “\”?

I have looked at using regex but I have never been able to understand its wonders and powers

Answer 1

This Regex pattern will match everything through the 4th \

^(?:.*?\\){4}

usage:

var result = Regex.Replace(inputString, @"^(?:.*?\\){4}", @"\\10.0.1.1\Archive\");

To elucidate the Regex a bit:

^ // denotes start of line
 (?:…) // we need to group some stuff, so we use parens, and ?: denotes that we do not want to use the parens for capturing (this is a performance optimization)
 .*? // denotes any character, zero or more times, until what follows (\)
 \\ //denotes a backslash (the backslash is also escape char)
 {4} // repeat 4 times