Question

In my c# application i want to convert a string characters to special characters.
My input string is “G\u00f6teborg” and i want the output as Göteborg.

I am using below code,

 string name = "G\\u00f6teborg";

 StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(name);
 sb = sb.Replace(@"\\",@"\");
 string name1 = System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(sb.ToString());
 Console.WriteLine(name1);

In the above code the double slash remains the same , it is not replacing to single slash, so after decoding i am getting the output as G\u00f6teborg .

Please help to find a solution for this.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

string name = "G\\u00f6teborg";

Just remove one of the backslashes:

string name = "G\u00f6teborg";

If you got the input from a user then you need to do more: it’s not enough to replace a backslash because that’s not how the characters are stored internally, the \uXXXX is an escape sequence representing a Unicode code point.

If you want to replace a user input escape sequence by a Unicode code point you need to parse the user input properly. You can use a regular expression for that:

MatchEvaluator replacer = m => ((char) int.Parse(m.Groups[1].Value, NumberStyles.AllowHexSpecifier)).ToString();
string result = Regex.Replace(name, @"\\u([a-fA-F0-9]{4})", replacer);

This matches each escape group (\u followed by four hex digits), extracts the hex digits, parses them and translates them to a character.