Most efficient way to remove special characters from string

327

I want to remove all special characters from a string. Allowed characters are A-Z (uppercase or lowercase), numbers (0-9), underscore (_), or the dot sign (.).

I have the following, it works but I suspect (I know!) it's not very efficient:

    public static string RemoveSpecialCharacters(string str)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        for (int i = 0; i < str.Length; i++)
        {
            if ((str[i] >= '0' && str[i] <= '9')
                || (str[i] >= 'A' && str[i] <= 'z'
                    || (str[i] == '.' || str[i] == '_')))
                {
                    sb.Append(str[i]);
                }
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }

What is the most efficient way to do this? What would a regular expression look like, and how does it compare with normal string manipulation?

The strings that will be cleaned will be rather short, usually between 10 and 30 characters in length.

c# string special-characters

Edit Report

The following code has the following output (conclusion is that we can also save some memory resources allocating array smaller size):

lookup = new bool[123];

for (var c = '0'; c <= '9'; c++)
{
    lookup[c] = true; System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((int)c + ": " + (char)c);
}

for (var c = 'A'; c <= 'Z'; c++)
{
    lookup[c] = true; System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((int)c + ": " + (char)c);
}

for (var c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++)
{
    lookup[c] = true; System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((int)c + ": " + (char)c);
}

48: 0  
49: 1  
50: 2  
51: 3  
52: 4  
53: 5  
54: 6  
55: 7  
56: 8  
57: 9  
65: A  
66: B  
67: C  
68: D  
69: E  
70: F  
71: G  
72: H  
73: I  
74: J  
75: K  
76: L  
77: M  
78: N  
79: O  
80: P  
81: Q  
82: R  
83: S  
84: T  
85: U  
86: V  
87: W  
88: X  
89: Y  
90: Z  
97: a  
98: b  
99: c  
100: d  
101: e  
102: f  
103: g  
104: h  
105: i  
106: j  
107: k  
108: l  
109: m  
110: n  
111: o  
112: p  
113: q  
114: r  
115: s  
116: t  
117: u  
118: v  
119: w  
120: x  
121: y  
122: z

You can also add the following code lines to support Russian locale (array size will be 1104):

for (var c = 'А'; c <= 'Я'; c++)
{
    lookup[c] = true; System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((int)c + ": " + (char)c);
}

for (var c = 'а'; c <= 'я'; c++)
{
    lookup[c] = true; System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine((int)c + ": " + (char)c);
}

answered 2012-04-19T14:16:53.090

Most efficient way to remove special characters from string

1 Answer

Your Answer