What's the most efficient way to format the following string?

Posted by Ian P on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Ian P
Published on 2010-05-20T17:51:51Z Indexed on 2010/05/20 18:00 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 280

Filed under:

c#

|

formatting

|

string

I have a very simple question, and I shouldn't be hung up on this, but I am. Haha!

I have a string that I receive in the following format(s):

123

123456-753

123455-43

234234-4

123415

The desired output, post formatting, is:

123-455-444

123-455-55

123-455-5

or

123-455

The format is ultimately dependent upon the total number of characters in the original string..

I have several ideas of how to do this, but I keep thing there's a better way than string.Replace and concatenate...

Thanks for the suggestions..

Ian

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More

Related posts about formatting

C++ Formatting like visual studio c# formatting

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I like the way Visual studio (2008) format C# code; unfortunately it seems it doesn't behave in the same way when writing C++ code. For example, when I write a code in this way: class Test { public: int x; Test() {this->x=20;} ~Test(){} }; in C# (ok this is C++ but you can understand… >>> More
Why do XSLT editors insert tab or space characters into XSLT to format it?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
All XSLT editors I've tried till now add tab or space characters to the XSLT to indent it for formatting. This is done even in places within the XSLT where these characters are significant to the XSLT processor. XSLT modified for formatting in this way can produce output very different to that of… >>> More
Excel: conditionally format a cell using the format of another, content-matching cell

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have an Excel spreadsheet where I’d like to be able to create a “key” of formatted cells with unique values, and then in another sheet format cells using the key formatting. So for example, my key is as follows, with one value per cell and the visual formatting indicated in parentheses: A (red… >>> More
Globalize your Web Applications: PHP's Locale Formatting Classes

as seen on Internet.com - Search for 'Internet.com'
In part 3 of the Globalize your Web Applications series, we'll be exploring PHP's I18N_Number and I18N_Currency classes, both of which are part of the I18N Libraries. >>> More
Tip#102: Did you know… How to specify tag specific formatting

as seen on ASP.net Weblogs - Search for 'ASP.net Weblogs'
Let’s see this with an example. I have the following html code on my page. Now if I format the document by selecting Edit –> Format document (or Ctrl K, Ctrl D) The document becomes I want the content inside td should remain on the same line Read More......(read more) >>> More