Question

Trying to do some regex matching and replacement in a string, whereby all ampersand, single quote, and space characters are replaced with dashes “-“

…and

all repeating dashes are replaced with a single dash.

This is what I’m trying but it’s not working, in that the repeating dashes aren’t being substituted. Any help is appreciated and thanks.

Regex.Replace(mystring, "([' &])|([-]{2,})", "-")

Answer 1

Try this one (seems more simple). I’m assuming you never want “–” in the result.

string orig = "12467&89- 1&2467'89 12'46789 12467--89";

Regex regex = new Regex("[&' -]+");

string newString = regex.Replace(orig, "-");

output:

12467-89-1-2467-89-12-46789-12467-8