Question

I have the following string:

string input = "  2  1";

It is 2 spaces followed by a 2 and then 2 more spaces followed by a 1. I want to do a replace on it, but I only want to replace the spaces between the 2 and the 1 with 0’s and I do not want to use RegEx if possible?

The end result should look like this:

string result = "  2001";

20 340400 1 – 20-34-04-00-00001.0-0000.00

20 340400 500 – 20-34-04-00-00500.0-0000.00

20 340900 C – 20-34-09-00-0000C.0-0000.00

20 3435OG 1 1 – 20-34-35-OG-00001.0-0001.00

20 3435OG 2 10 – 20-34-35-OG-00002.0-0010.00

20 3435OG A – 20-34-35-OG-0000A.0-0000.00

20 3436AA 1 4A – 20-34-36-AA-00001.0-0004.A

20 3436AA 2 10B – 20-34-36-AA-00002.0-0010.B

20 353100 268 – 20-35-31-00-00268.0-0000.00

20G3402AI 1 401 – 20G-34-02-AI-00001.0-0004.01

20G3403AI 7 1 – 20G-34-03-AI-00007.0-0001.00

20G3416MK 1701 – 20G-34-16-MK-00000.0-0017.01

21 3410OM 148 – 21-34-10-OM-00000.0-0147.00

A few things I have noticed is that the first 4 parts are put together, most of the spaces and decimals are removed. I have had success without regex in most cases, but it fails for some.

Answer 1

How about:

static string ReplaceSpacesWithZerosExceptLeading(string s)
{
    return s.TrimStart(' ').Replace(' ', '0').PadLeft(s.Length);
}

This will remove the leading spaces, then replace the rest with zeros, then put the leading ones back on.

EDIT: Never mind, this answer already exists…