C Style String Encoding

October 17, 2006 • from Maui, Hawaii • 8 comments

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Today I was creating a couple of parsers that needed to pick up some default text for templating. Basically it’s some XML text that serves as a header to the XML document. Rather than writing it out using the XmlWriter I just want to grab the header (header, schema etc. which won’t change) and then only write the body as Xml. This certainly is easier than creating the schema with XmlWriter…

So I run into this all of the time how do you quickly create a C compatible string from the text? C# has the nice @"string" syntax that makes it fairly easy to create long block strings but it still requires encoding quotes. So since I’ve done this a million times I wrote a quick utlity that does this for me. I paste the string into the form and it returns me a C# formatted string:

You paste a string in the top and it dumps the formatted string expression into the window below and your clipboard.

Obviously this is a super trivial thing to do but it’s a useful utility to have around. I can’t recount the number of times I take a string from somewhere and manual encode the damn quotes <s>. Well, no more. I remember having seen an add-in for .NET some time related to this but I couldn’t find it and frankly I rather not add anything like this into the VS environment anyway.

Anyway, maybe some of you find this useful. You can grab the CStringEncoder file from here.

The Voices of Reason

Horses
October 17, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

Dude, wouldn't it just be easier to select the text, hit Ctrl+H and replace " with ""?

Rick Strahl
October 17, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

Uh, yes <g>... <sigh> sometimes I feel like a moron... missing the forest for the trees.

I suppose the true CString encoding will come handy in C++ though <s>. It'll return a string like this:

"<head runat=\"server\">\r\n" +
"    <title>Web Form Localization</title>\r\n" +
"    <link href=\"../Westwind.css\" rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" />\r\n" +
"</head>"

Ok, I'm stretching for it now...

Rob Conery
October 17, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

Blame it on the quake :). Glad to hear all's well on Maui!

Atanas Korchev
October 18, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

I don't know why but I prefer the latter. I just don't like the "@" in front of my strings. And somehow I prefer ' \" ' than ' "" ' (maybe it's my C background calling). I would also like your converter program as a web form.

Rick Strahl
October 18, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

Atanas, there's always one <s>...

I really wonder about that choice though: The @"" syntax is a lot cleaner ESPECIALLY if you create multiline strings since there's only one escaped character (") vs. 10 or so. The @ syntax certainly is nice for complex SQL statements because you can pretty much just paste a SQL statement into text.

I guess I'm spoiled from my FoxPro background where there is:

TEXT TO VarName
<text expression with any content>
ENDTEXT

and 3 different string delimiters, both of which made it much easier to create complex strings especially for things like JavaScript or JavaScript expressions which is one thing I was just struggling with - the single C# string delimiter really gets in the way when you need to create content that includes other strings using double or single quotes alot. Or heck ASP.NET page level <% %> expressions - that's where extra delimiters would REALLY help.

Atanas Korchev
October 20, 2006

# re: C Style String Encoding

Now I remember :) I just can't seem to understand that I must type "{{" than "{" when using "@" and string.Format. Other than that the "@" syntax is ok (especially in regular expressions).

Tariq
July 02, 2009

# re: C Style String Encoding

That link doesnt seem to be working anymore ?

Got a working one :)

Rick Strahl
July 02, 2009

# re: C Style String Encoding

I've put the file back up. Not sure how it got removed... <shrug>

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