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Marcin Jamro, PhD, DSc
How to get alphanumeric key from string?
C# | .NET
There is sometimes the necessity to generate an alphanumeric key from a string, such as to generate a part of the URL based on the article title. You need to make all letters lower-case and replace some language-specific characters, as well as replace all characters other than a-z and 0-9 with a dash. What's more, no more than one dash in a row is allowed. How to solve this problem?
The most important actions are performed in the following method:
string GetKey(string text) { // Replace some language-specific characters. Dictionaryreplace = new() { { 'ą', 'a' }, { 'ć', 'c' }, { 'ę', 'e' }, { 'ł', 'l' }, { 'ń', 'n' }, { 'ó', 'o' }, { 'ś', 's' }, { 'ź', 'z' }, { 'ż', 'z' } }; text = text.ToLower(); foreach ((char from, char to) in replace) { text = text.Replace(from, to); } // Replace all not-supported characters with dashes. List supported = []; for (char c = 'a'; c <= 'z'; c++) { supported.Add(c); } for (char c = '0'; c <= '9'; c++) { supported.Add(c); } string key = string.Empty; foreach (char c in text) { key += supported.Contains(c) ? c : '-'; } // Remove multiple dashes, as well as dashes at the beginning or end. key = key.Replace("--", "-"); key = key.Trim('-'); return key; }
To simplify testing, the Print
auxiliary method is shown below:
void Print(string text) { Console.Write(text); Console.Write(" -> "); Console.WriteLine(GetKey(text)); }
A few of its calls are presented as follows:
Print("Hello world!"); Print("Dzień dobry w przepięknej Polsce! :-)"); Print("I was born on 9.11.1988.");
If you run the code, you will get the following result:
Hello world! -> hello-world Dzień dobry w przepięknej Polsce! :-) -> dzien-dobry-w-przepieknej-polsce I was born on 9.11.1988. -> i-was-born-on-9-11-1988
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