String manipulation, trim and replace not working

Question

3.00/5 (3 votes)

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Using VB.net 2010
I've tried strLine2 = strLine2.Trim(" ") and strLine2 = strLine2.Replace(" ", "") with no luck I'm still getting a value in strLine2 similar to

"                   Start of Text "

Is there a way to look for a ascii character greater than 64, which I believe is A (ok A is actually 65, thus the greater than 64 part). So something along the lines of:

strLine2 = strLine2.Substring(strLine2.IndexOf('Ascii character > 64'))

Thanks in advance!!!

Ok this is the code I have, and it's pretty simple:

strline1 = strLine.Substring(0, strLine.IndexOf("     "))
strLine2 = strLine.Substring(strline1.Length + 1)
strLine2 = strLine2.Trim()
strLine = strline1 + strLine2

This is the value of strLine at the end:

Someplace, Someplace & Someplace Water District                                                                                                            Client Number: 000000

Forgot to explain what this is for, sorry...
This is part of a app that reads a text file and changes it over to a word doc, the problem is the text file can have a insane number of spaces on a line that will never fit onto one line in a word doc. So I have to be able to split up the text in the line and get it to where it will fit. The current line has 126 spaces between the last character in the first group of characters and the start of the second group of characters. Does this make more sense now?

Posted 27-Apr-11 7:30am

MacRaider4

Updated 27-Apr-11 7:52am

v3

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6 solutions

Solution 1

Don't use a space with trim

Dim x As String = " Start of Text "
Dim y As String = x.Trim()
' y will equal ("Start of Text")

Posted 27-Apr-11 7:39am

Greg Osborne

Solution 4

You could use a LINQ query to easily pull the alpha characters from a string

Dim myString As String = "abC123X!!"
Dim q = From a In myString.ToCharArray() _
        Where Char.IsLetter(a) _
        Select a
Dim anewString As String = Nothing
If q.Count() > 0 Then
    anewString = Convert.ToString(q.ToArray())
End If

If you are looking for just uppercase characters, change char.IsLetter to char.IsUpper.

Posted 27-Apr-11 7:54am

Greg Osborne

Comments

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:02pm

good thought and I thought of something similar like the regex idea, but stepping through that code 100+ times for countless lines would take way too much time when you are looking at 66 lines per page time who knows how many pages.

Solution 5

Bare with me as I make some assumptions here...

Is the text file the same format for every line? If so then I am assuming you have some sort of extract from a database in fixed-field format. If this is the case, do you know the field definitions of the source? (i.e., field 1 is 126 characters, field 2 is 16 characters, field 3 is 4 characters, etc.). If you have the field sizes, then all you would need to do is

Dim field1 as string = source.SubString(0,126).Trim()
Dim field2 as string = source.SubString(127,16).Trim() '126+1
Dim field3 as string = source.SubString(144,4).Trim() '126+16+1
'etc...

You'd need to do this for each line. Does this help?

Posted 27-Apr-11 8:17am

Greg Osborne

Updated 27-Apr-11 8:22am

v4

Comments

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:23pm

That would be super if it were true, but it's not... I've looked at 15 different text files at this one line and the range is anywhere between 115 and 142 blank spaces between the two groups of strings. Otherwise I could use something along the lines of strLine2 = source.Substring(source.indexof(" ") + 126) of which is how I first had it and when I got the the second letter, I had a problem.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:32pm

I just love when a project is going great and you run full speed into the "progress wall"...

Solution 6

Well, this is technically a solution, the data I was given to work with was wrong... So with the "correct" data, this works fine. Thanks all for the help though in trying to get this to work. You have given me some ideas to try going forward...

Posted 28-Apr-11 1:09am

MacRaider4

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Kschuler · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-27T07:39:00

Solution 2

...What are you trying to get rid of? Just normal spaces?
If so try...
strLine2 = strLine2.Trim
You don't need the (" "). If not, exactly what character are you trying to get rid of?

You can find the ascii value of a character this way:

Asc(myChar)

If you are using this to make sure only valid characters are used, I'd suggest you research Regular Expressions[^].

---- Edit ----------

I think you need to take a look at this article[^].

It shows how to remove white space using regular expressions. I think it will give you some ideas on how to perform these tasks without having to worry about how many spaces there are or what index a word starts at. Here is the basic code to replace multiple spaces, carriage returns, and tabs with a single space:

VB

Dim myRegex As New System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex("\s+")
strNoWhiteSpace = myRegex.Replace(strLine, "\s+", " ")

Posted 27-Apr-11 7:39am

Kschuler

Updated 27-Apr-11 8:38am

v2

Comments

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 13:41pm

The problem is I don't know what the first character is going to be, it could be any letter of the alphabet. The only upside is I do know that it's going to be a alpha character. I have also tried just plain .Trim and that doesn't work either.

Kschuler 27-Apr-11 13:44pm

Okay...but what are you trying to do? What is the end result you are looking for? Does your string include the double quotes and that's why trim isn't working? Or are you only trying to remove one space? Please update your question with more information about what you are starting with, what you want the end result to be, and what you are getting with the current code you are using.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 13:49pm

Just did...

Kschuler 27-Apr-11 13:53pm

Maybe update one more time and include what the value of strLine is before you run that code.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 13:58pm

It's the same value, just has a few more spaces in it... strLine1 is correct and ends with the last character of the first group, it's strLine2 that is the problem for some reason.

Kschuler 27-Apr-11 14:09pm

So basically you have a string, and you want to change any place inside that string that has more than one space into just a single space?

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:17pm

At this point, if I could just get them split up into the two strings without a ton of blank spaces infront of the second one I'd be happy. Eventually I'm going to have to figure out how to use tabs when writing the line in word, but I figure I need to get my data in order first. But since you asked. It would be something along the lines of strLine1 would be written to the word doc and then on the same line at tab stop 7 (just guessing on the number right now) strLine2 would start.

Kschuler 27-Apr-11 14:39pm

I updated my solution.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:57pm

Ok I tried that and no luck, so I did the following MessageBox.Show("a" & strLine(strline1.Length + 1) & Asc(strLine(strline1.Length + 1))) the messagebox pops up with just "a 32" in it.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 15:14pm

Ok, wasn't sure where to put this so I picked here... I opened the file on my local PC (XP) vs my win 2k8 terminal services sessions with PFE, when I do that I'm seeing the "black boxes" you were talking about. I also noticed that "3 pages" down, that line doesn't have the "black boxes" and is working how we'd expect it to work.

#realJSOP · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-27T07:42:00

Solution 3

string.Trim() trims all leading and trailing whitespace (including tab characters) unless you specify the character to "trim". I bet your leading whitespace is a series of tab characters, nd it's not trimming those because you're specifying the space character.

Posted 27-Apr-11 7:42am

#realJSOP

Comments

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:01pm

I checked the txt file and there are no tabs in it...

#realJSOP 27-Apr-11 14:43pm

Here's a novel idea - use the debugger and inspect the string contents *IN THE PROGRAM*.

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 15:06pm

Those results would be found above....

Greg Osborne 27-Apr-11 14:26pm

Could the character be a null character (ascii 0)? Some editors change this to space, others display it as a box, some ignore it so you wouldn't even know it's there. are you sure it's specifically ascii 32 (chr(32))?

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 14:30pm

I've looked the the file in both notepad and programmer's file editor and the best I can tell they are just plain old spaces which is why this doesn't make sense.

Greg Osborne 27-Apr-11 14:56pm

Suggest looking at it with an editor that will display hex values (such as EditPlus). Then you can be sure it is ascii 32 (hex 20).

MacRaider4 27-Apr-11 15:04pm

I got the value of one of the spaces and it is 32, look above...