C# Regex Trim Example

Regex trim. Regex can be used to trim whitespace.

Trimming a string removes whitespace and leaves only the important contents. Several methods are available, each with pluses and minuses. We trim strings using Regex in the C# programming language.

Example. Regexes are very powerful, but also very powerful in giving me headaches. One problem I encountered was a multiple-line string. With Regex, you must indicate how you want the engine to treat newlines (\n).

Note: The two options we use are RegexOptions.Multiline and RegexOptions.Singleline.

RegexOptions.Multiline

Note 2: My requirements were to trim the beginning and ending whitespace from a medium size (maybe several kilobytes) string.

C# program that trims with Regex

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
	//
	// Example string
	//
	string source = "  Some text ";
	//
	// Use the ^ to always match at the start of the string.
	// Then, look through all WHITESPACE characters with \s
	// Use + to look through more than 1 characters
	// Then replace with an empty string.
	//
	source = Regex.Replace(source, @"^\s+", "");

	//
	// The same as above, but with a $ on the end.
	// This requires that we match at the end.
	//
	source = Regex.Replace(source, @"\s+$", "");

	Console.Write("[");
	Console.Write(source);
	Console.WriteLine("]");
    }
}

Output

[Some text]

Example 2. Readers have commented on compiled Regex objects. Compiled regexes do make a substantial performance improvement. My quick tests showed that for using two compiled regexes 1,000 times each was about 47% faster than not compiling them.

Fragment that shows compiled Regex: C#

//
// Use two precompiled Regexes.
//
Regex a1 = new Regex(@"^\s+", RegexOptions.Compiled);
Regex a2 = new Regex(@"\s+$", RegexOptions.Compiled);

foreach (object item in _collection) // Example loop.
{
    //
    // Reuse the compiled regex objects over and over again.
    //
    string source = "  Some text ";
    source = a1.Replace(source, "");
    source = a2.Replace(source, ""); // compiled: 3620
}

Example 3. Here we look at another way you can trim strings using Regex. What if we could combine the two above regular expressions into a single one, and then compile that? Well, we certainly can do that, and I wrote the code.

Fragment that shows alternate syntax: C#

string source = "  Some text ";

//
// Use the alternate syntax "|" for combining both regexes.
//
source = Regex.Replace(source, @"^\s+|\s+$", "");

//
// Same as before but with the two alternates switched.
// source = Regex.Replace(source, @"\s+$|^\s+", "");
// ... we could compile all of these too.
//

Discussion. We need a balance between development time and code size. If you need Trim with different requirements than the built-in methods, the Regex methods will be easier. If it is at all reasonable for you to use the built-in Trim, do so.

TrimTrimEnd, TrimStart

Summary. We looked at some methods of trimming the starts and ends of strings using the System.Text.RegularExpressions namespace in the C# language. For my projects where performance is critical, I don't use Regex.

Note: Some programs focus on speed. But for many tasks, such as processing data in the background, Regex is ideal.

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