How do I replace the *first instance* of a string in .NET?

Question

I want to replace the first occurrence in a given string.

How can I accomplish this in .NET?

Answer 1

As itsmatt said Regex.Replace is a good choice for this however to make his answer more complete I will fill it in with a code sample:

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
...
Regex regex = new Regex("foo");
string result = regex.Replace("foo1 foo2 foo3 foo4", "bar", 1);             
// result = "bar1 foo2 foo3 foo4"

The third parameter, set to 1 in this case, is the number of occurrences of the regex pattern that you want to replace in the input string from the beginning of the string.

I was hoping this could be done with a static Regex.Replace overload but unfortunately it appears you need a Regex instance to accomplish it.