What is a quick way to force CRLF in C# / .NET?

Question

How would you normalize all new-line sequences in a string to one type?

I\'m looking to make them all CRLF for the purpose of email (MIME documents). Ideally this w

Answer 1

It depends on exactly what the requirements are. In particular, how do you want to handle "\r" on its own? Should that count as a line break or not? As an example, how should "a\n\rb" be treated? Is that one very odd line break, one "\n" break and then a rogue "\r", or two separate linebreaks? If "\r" and "\n" can both be linebreaks on their own, why should "\r\n" not be treated as two linebreaks?

Here's some code which I suspect is reasonably efficient.

using System;
using System.Text;

class LineBreaks
{    
    static void Main()
    {
        Test("a\nb");
        Test("a\nb\r\nc");
        Test("a\r\nb\r\nc");
        Test("a\rb\nc");
        Test("a\r");
        Test("a\n");
        Test("a\r\n");
    }

    static void Test(string input)
    {
        string normalized = NormalizeLineBreaks(input);
        string debug = normalized.Replace("\r", "\\r")
                                 .Replace("\n", "\\n");
        Console.WriteLine(debug);
    }

    static string NormalizeLineBreaks(string input)
    {
        // Allow 10% as a rough guess of how much the string may grow.
        // If we're wrong we'll either waste space or have extra copies -
        // it will still work
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder((int) (input.Length * 1.1));

        bool lastWasCR = false;

        foreach (char c in input)
        {
            if (lastWasCR)
            {
                lastWasCR = false;
                if (c == '\n')
                {
                    continue; // Already written \r\n
                }
            }
            switch (c)
            {
                case '\r':
                    builder.Append("\r\n");
                    lastWasCR = true;
                    break;
                case '\n':
                    builder.Append("\r\n");
                    break;
                default:
                    builder.Append(c);
                    break;
            }
        }
        return builder.ToString();
    }
}