Replace Multiple String Elements in C#

Question

Is there a better way of doing this...

MyString.Trim().Replace("&", "and").Replace(",", "").Replace("  ", " ")
         .Replace(" ", "-").Replace("'", "").Replace("/", "").ToLower();

I've extended the string class to keep it down to one job but is there a quicker way?

public static class StringExtension
{
    public static string clean(this string s)
    {
        return s.Replace("&", "and").Replace(",", "").Replace("  ", " ")
                .Replace(" ", "-").Replace("'", "").Replace(".", "")
                .Replace("eacute;", "é").ToLower();
    }
}

---

Just for fun (and to stop the arguments in the comments) I've shoved a gist up benchmarking the various examples below.

https://gist.github.com/ChrisMcKee/5937656

The regex option scores terribly; the dictionary option comes up the fastest; the long winded version of the stringbuilder replace is slightly faster than the short hand.

Answer 1

Quicker - no. More effective - yes, if you will use the StringBuilder class. With your implementation each operation generates a copy of a string which under circumstances may impair performance. Strings are immutable objects so each operation just returns a modified copy.

If you expect this method to be actively called on multiple Strings of significant length, it might be better to "migrate" its implementation onto the StringBuilder class. With it any modification is performed directly on that instance, so you spare unnecessary copy operations.

public static class StringExtention
{
    public static string clean(this string s)
    {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder (s);

        sb.Replace("&", "and");
        sb.Replace(",", "");
        sb.Replace("  ", " ");
        sb.Replace(" ", "-");
        sb.Replace("'", "");
        sb.Replace(".", "");
        sb.Replace("eacute;", "é");

        return sb.ToString().ToLower();
    }
}