Question

My program will take arbitrary strings from the internet and use them for file names. Is there a simple way to remove the bad characters from these strings or do I need to write a custom function for this?

Answer 1

Ugh, I hate it when people try to guess at which characters are valid. Besides being completely non-portable (always thinking about Mono), both of the earlier comments missed more 25 invalid characters.

foreach (var c in Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars())  {    fileName = fileName.Replace(c, '-');  } 

Or in VB:

'Clean just a filename Dim filename As String = "salmnas dlajhdla kjha;dmas'lkasn" For Each c In IO.Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars     filename = filename.Replace(c, "") Next  'See also IO.Path.GetInvalidPathChars