Removing unrecognized ASCII characters from string

Question

I'm parsing html using HTML Agility Pack and from time to time I get weird looking strings like:"–". What is the simplest way to remove them ? By the way, I'm using C#.

Answer 1

You probably need to look into why you are getting those characters in the first place, and it will likely be something is wrong with the encoding

But if you do need to remove all the non-ascii characters from a string, the regex [^ -~] does the trick

        var stripped = Regex.Replace("străipped of baâ€d charâ€cters", "[^ -~]", "");
        Console.WriteLine(stripped); //outputs "stripped of bad characters"

see http://www.catonmat.net/blog/my-favorite-regex/ for the explanation of why that regex works