Escaping backslashes in string

Question

I would like to know what is a good way to escape back slashes in a string without adding unnecessary slashes to it.

I mean, usually if I want to escape a backslash in a string, the simplest way is to use String.Replace() like so:

string s = someString.Replace("\\", "\\\\");

A similar thing can be done with regular expressions using Regex.Replace().

Now my question is, lets say I have a string that has some of its back slashes escaped like for example: "C:\some_folder\\some_file.bin"

Now if I try and replace the backslashes in that by adding another backslash before each occurrence, I will end up with the following string:

"C:\\some_folder\\\\some_file.bin"

No clearly, the \\\\ are unnecessary, so how do I go about ignoring already escaped characters?

Answer 1

I think, this is what you want to do-

   string path = @"C:\some_folder\\some_file.bin";
   string exactPath = string.Join("\\",path.Split(new char[] { '\\' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries));

Answer 2

here is a RegEx Approach

string Result = Regex.Replace("C:\\some_folder\\\\some_file.bin", "[\\\\]+", "\\");  

in that case you need to escape for RegEx AND for C#. alternatively you can write

string Result = Regex.Replace(@"C:\some_folder\\some_file.bin",@"[\\]+",@"\");

because "\\" equals @"\"