Need C# Regex for replacing spaces inside of strings

Question

Using C#, I need a some code to use regular expressions to replace spaces inside of quotes with a pipe character (|). problem is that the string could contain multiple quoted expressions and I only want the spaces inside of quotes.

I tried a few things but I am struggling with how to handle the variable number of words that could be inside of quotes, amongst other things.

Here is some examples of what may be input, and the required output:

"word1 word2"
-> "word1|word2"

"word1 word2" word3 "word4 word5"
-> "word1|word2" word3 "word4|word5"

word1 "word2 word3"
-> word1 "word2|word3"

Any help greatly appreciated, and hopefully I will learn about regular expressions.

Does it need to be regex? I think a simple loop would do the trick with more clarity. — Sergey Kalinichenko
@dasblinkenlight - Completely agree. Whenever I have to deal with tokenizing quoted strings a loop is always easier to debug and read later. It's only a couple lines of code and will perform better too. — Josh

Guffa Guffa · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-22T01:11:30

Use a regular expresion to find the quotes, and a plain Replace to replace the spaces:

str = Regex.Replace(str, @"""[^""]+""", m => m.Value.Replace(' ', '|'));

Need C# Regex for replacing spaces inside of strings

2 Answers