Question

This problem comes to me when I was writing delimiter value in a XML config file, normally when you write a string like "\t" in XML config, parser class like XDocument will automatically convert it to @"\\t" so that you are getting a backslash and a 't' from the string that is parsed from the config. However, what I want is just a tab character rather than a two-character string.

So the problem turns into: given a string containing an escape sequence like "\t", how do I convert it into a one-character tab?

Answer 1

You can do something like this:

stringValue = stringValue.Replace("\\t", "\t");

I wrote the following method to replace a bunch of common escape character sequences.

    public static string LiteralValue(this string value)
    {
        return value
            .Replace("\\\\", "\\")
            .Replace("\\a", "\a")
            .Replace("\\b", "\b")
            .Replace("\\f", "\f")
            .Replace("\\n", "\n")
            .Replace("\\r", "\r")
            .Replace("\\t", "\t")
            .Replace("\\v", "\v")
            .Replace("\\0", "\0");
    }