How do I Add Single Back Slashes to a String in Visual Studio 2005

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How do I Add Single Back Slashes to a String in Visual Studio 2005

I have a string that reads "hello.world", and what I would like to do is to change this to "hello\.world" so that I can use it in a regular expression and have the period used as a period - rather than as a wildcard (which it is in a regular expression)

The problem occurs when I try to add a single backslash

Example Code:

string s = "hello.world";
char ch = (char)0x5C;
s += ch;

result:
s = "hello.world\\";

---------
string s = "hello.world";
s = s.Replace(".", @"\.");

result:
s = "hello\\.world";

---------------
string s = "hello.world";
s += @"\";

result:
s = "hello.world\\";

When I go to display the string in a messagebox - it displays fine because the double backslash is used as an escape character - however, when trying to use the string for a regular expression, or any kind of string comparison - it's useless.

Note: I have tested, and this only occurs in Visual Studio 2005, not in 2003.

So my question is: How can I add a single backslash to a string in Visual Studio 2005

Thanks

El Carrot

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How do I Add Single Back Slashes to a String in Visual Studio 2005

  • Hedda

    FROM MSDN

    The regular expression \s2000, when applied to a body of text, matches all occurrences of the string "2000" that are preceded by any white-space character, such as a space or a tab.

    If you are using C++, C#, or JScript, special escape characters, such as \s, must be preceded by an additional backslash (for example, "\\s2000") to signal that the backslash in the escape character is a literal character. Otherwise, the regular expression engine treats the backslash and the s in \s as two separate operators. You do not have to add the backslash if you are using Visual Basic 2005. If you are using C#, you can use C# literal strings, which are prefixed with @ and disable escaping (for example, @"\s2000").



  • CMAN5000

    you are confused because of debugger of VS 2005.

    your strings are fine - just debugger adds additional slash as it is normal in C oriented languages.

    it is better to use this way


    s = @"hello\.world";

    //result is "hello\.world"
    //in debugger is seen as "hello\\.world" which should not worry you

    hope this helps



  • dannymking

    Thanks for the response. It appears that you are correct - it's just quite confusing when I'm tracking it through the debugger and I see a string value which doesn't match what I have set.

    The other part that makes it confusing is that Visual Studio 2003 doesn't do this.

  • LOURENÇO MANTOVANI

    I knew this already - the part that confused me was when I looked at the value through the debugger - it would show any backslash contained in a string as an escaped character even though I had not set it as an escaped character.
  • How do I Add Single Back Slashes to a String in Visual Studio 2005
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