How to Effectively Remove Illegal Characters from File Paths and Filenames in C#?

Clear illegal characters in paths and file names

To protect file system integrity and ensure compatibility across operating systems, certain characters are considered illegal in paths and file names. Removing these characters is critical to successful file operations and storage operations.

A common way to solve this problem is to use the Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars() and Path.GetInvalidPathChars() methods in the System.IO namespace. However, the code provided in the original question does not correctly do what is required. The problem is relying on the Trim() method, which only removes leading and trailing space characters.

To correct this, a more powerful and comprehensive method is needed to clean up all occurrences of illegal characters in strings. An effective solution is to use the Split() method to split the string according to the illegal character set. The resulting array can then be reassembled back together to form a string without problem characters.

The following is a modified version of the code that effectively removes illegal characters from a specified string:

using System;
using System.IO;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string illegal = "\"M\"" + "\a/ry/ h**ad:>> a\/:*?\"| li*tt|le|| la\"mb.?";

            // 删除非法文件字符
            string withoutFileInvalidChars = string.Concat(illegal.Split(Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()));

            // 删除非法路径字符
            string withoutPathInvalidChars = string.Concat(withoutFileInvalidChars.Split(Path.GetInvalidPathChars()));

            Console.WriteLine(withoutPathInvalidChars);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }
}

Additionally, you can choose to replace illegal characters with suitable replacement characters instead of simply deleting them. To do this, use the string.Join() method with a delimiter of your choice, as shown in the following code snippet:

string replacedInvalidChars = string.Join("_", illegal.Split(Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()));

This method replaces all illegal characters with underscores, providing a readable and consistent string. Specific replacement characters can be customized to meet your specific needs.

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