Normalize newlines in C#

Question

I have a data stream that may contain \\r, \\n, \\r\\n, \\n\\r or any combination of them. Is there a simple way to normalize the data to make all of them simply become \\r

Answer 1

I believe this will do what you need:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
// ...
string normalized = Regex.Replace(originalString, @"\r\n|\n\r|\n|\r", "\r\n");

I'm not 100% sure on the exact syntax, and I don't have a .Net compiler handy to check. I wrote it in perl, and converted it into (hopefully correct) C#. The only real trick is to match "\r\n" and "\n\r" first.

To apply it to an entire stream, just run in on chunks of input. (You could do this with a stream wrapper if you want.)

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The original perl:

$str =~ s/\r\n|\n\r|\n|\r/\r\n/g;

The test results:

[bash$] ./test.pl
\r -> \r\n
\n -> \r\n
\n\n -> \r\n\r\n
\n\r -> \r\n
\r\n -> \r\n
\r\n\n -> \r\n\r\n

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Update: Now converts \n\r to \r\n, though I wouldn't call that normalization.