Length of string WITHOUT spaces (C#)

Question

Quick little question...

I need to count the length of a string, but WITHOUT the spaces inside of it. E.g. for a string like "I am Bob", string.Length would return 8 (6 letters + 2 spaces).

I need a method, or something, to give me the length (or number of) just the letters (6 in the case of "I am Bob")

I have tried the following

s.Replace (" ", "");
s.Replace (" ", null);
s.Replace (" ", string.empty);

to try and get "IamBob", which I did, but it didn't solve my problem because it still counted "" as a character.

Any help?

Solution 1

This returns the number of non-whitespace characters:

"I am Bob".Count(c => !Char.IsWhiteSpace(c));

Demo

Char.IsWhiteSpace:

White space characters are the following Unicode characters:

• Members of the SpaceSeparator category, which includes the characters SPACE (U+0020), OGHAM SPACE MARK (U+1680), MONGOLIAN VOWEL SEPARATOR (U+180E), EN QUAD (U+2000), EM QUAD (U+2001), EN SPACE (U+2002), EM SPACE (U+2003), THREE-PER-EM SPACE (U+2004), FOUR-PER-EM SPACE (U+2005), SIX-PER-EM SPACE (U+2006), FIGURE SPACE (U+2007), PUNCTUATION SPACE (U+2008), THIN SPACE (U+2009), HAIR SPACE (U+200A), NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F), MEDIUM MATHEMATICAL SPACE (U+205F), and IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE (U+3000).
• Members of the LineSeparator category, which consists solely of the LINE SEPARATOR character (U+2028).
• Members of the ParagraphSeparator category, which consists solely of the PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR character (U+2029).
• The characters CHARACTER TABULATION (U+0009), LINE FEED (U+000A), LINE TABULATION (U+000B), FORM FEED (U+000C), CARRIAGE RETURN (U+000D), NEXT LINE (U+0085), and NO-BREAK SPACE (U+00A0).

Solution 2

No. It doesn't.

string s = "I am Bob";
Console.WriteLine(s.Replace(" ", "").Length); // 6
Console.WriteLine(s.Replace(" ", null).Length); //6
Console.WriteLine(s.Replace(" ", string.Empty).Length); //6

Here is a DEMO.

But what are whitespace characters?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character

Solution 3

You probably forgot to reassign the result of Replace. Try this:

string s = "I am bob";
Console.WriteLine(s.Length); // 8
s = s.Replace(" ", "");
Console.WriteLine(s.Length); // 6

Solution 4

A pretty simple way is to write an extension method that will do just that- count the characters without the white spaces. Here's the code:

public static class MyExtension
{
    public static int CharCountWithoutSpaces(this string str)
    {
        string[] arr = str.Split(' ');
        string allChars = "";
        foreach (string s in arr)
        {
            allChars += s;
        }
        int length = allChars.Length;
        return length;
    }
}

To execute, simply call the method on the string:

string yourString = "I am Bob";
        int count = yourString.CharCountWithoutSpaces();
        Console.WriteLine(count); //=6

Alternatively, you can split the string an way you want if you don't want to include say, periods or commas:

string[] arr = str.Split('.');

or:

string[] arr = str.Split(',');

View more solutions

Comments

[AdrianHHH]

How fast is string.Lenght (or even string.Length)? Would it be better to assign it to a variable before the loop and then use that variable twice? And why all the @ characters in @string?

[Jeppe Stig Nielsen]

Or maybe "I am Bob".Length - "I am Bob".Count(Char.IsWhiteSpace) which does a subtraction but doesn't need to create a lambda. No, I am probably micro-optimizing.

[Jeppe Stig Nielsen]

Good point he probably forgot to re-assign. I agree. Otherwise it would have worked for him. But there is no reason to have multiple Replace after each other like you have above. Once all spaces are replaced by "", there's no more spaces to replace in the calls that follow.

[burning_LEGION]

@AdrianHHH this is template to create method therefore i don't optimize it, read about c# to know what is @

[Jeppe Stig Nielsen]

Great, maybe this comment will get +1 as well :-) If your string "I am Bob" might contain combining accents or surrogate pairs (Unicode characters that need two 16-bit values in UTF-16), then the interpretation of the count (or even Length) should be careful.

[Admin]

Wow, now I feel incredibly stupid... Exactly right, I didn't assign the new value so it just got lost. Made a local variable to hold the new string without spaces, works like a charm. THANK YOU!