Replace Multiple String Elements in C#

Question

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();
    }
}

If you are simply after a pretty solution and don't need to save a few nanoseconds, how about some LINQ sugar?

var input = "test1test2test3";
var replacements = new Dictionary<string, string> { { "1", "*" }, { "2", "_" }, { "3", "&" } };

var output = replacements.Aggregate(input, (current, replacement) => current.Replace(replacement.Key, replacement.Value));

this will be more efficient:

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

Maybe a little more readable?

    public static class StringExtension {

        private static Dictionary<string, string> _replacements = new Dictionary<string, string>();

        static StringExtension() {
            _replacements["&"] = "and";
            _replacements[","] = "";
            _replacements["  "] = " ";
            // etc...
        }

        public static string clean(this string s) {
            foreach (string to_replace in _replacements.Keys) {
                s = s.Replace(to_replace, _replacements[to_replace]);
            }
            return s;
        }
    }

Also add New In Town's suggestion about StringBuilder...

There is one thing that may be optimized in the suggested solutions. Having many calls to Replace() makes the code to do multiple passes over the same string. With very long strings the solutions may be slow because of CPU cache capacity misses. May be one should consider replacing multiple strings in a single pass.