Is there someone who have come across this situation.
Recently in one of my application i have to parse a CSV file and insert directly into the DB.
There was a lot null values in the CSV, so I had to replace it with "NULL" before inserting into the DB.
ie. if the CSV string contains the data
  "123,"XXXXX",,,1"
   My replacement would be
  "123,"XXXXX",NULL,NULL,1"

 But when using the replace functon

 the result was
 "123,"XXXXX",NULL,,1"

 It took quite a while for me to realise that I had to use the replace function twice to do this.
  ie.
  When I used
  strCSVString =
  strCSVString =

 it gave me the required output

 "123,"XXXXX",NULL,NULL,1"

 Is there something which I missing out here?
 OR is it a bug with C#.NET?

 I'm a regular customer to the replace funtion (When dealing with ASP,PHP,Coldfusion etc).. And when coming to C# it is really creating me a lot of problems...

 Please let me know if anyone can throw a light on this issue.

Hi ghari,

I don't think the .NET Framework would have functioned world wide if it had such obvious bugs...

Anyway, I think this is what happening. You start with this:

"123,"XXXXX",,,1"

It has 3 consecutive commas. Now you call Replace like this:

strCSVString.Replace(",,",",NULL,");

You replace two commas with NULL, In you original string, there is only one occurence of two consecutive commas. So, after the first call to Replace, you end up with:

"123,"XXXXX",NULL,,1"

This result is then stored back in strCSVString.

As you can see, there was no more than 1 occurence of the double commas up front, so the Replace function could only replace one. After Replace was called, you had another, but that was because you inserted a new one using NULL,

It's still a bit early in the morning here, so I might not be making sense, but I hope you understand what I am saying....

To fix this, use a loop to replace stuff while there are still two commas in strCSVString.

HtH,

Imar
---------------------------------------
Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.

A better approach for this might be to let the program do the hard work:

Take your inbound value and split it by the delimiter into an array:

string[] strValues = strInbound.Split(',');
//Note: using ' to enclose the delimiter implies the char type in C#
//Use ","c in VB.NET

Then you can spin thru the array and replace all occurences of String.Empty ("") with "NULL". Then you also have a data structure from which to construct your database query instead of just another string.

-Peter

Imar, I think you are right.
I just tried with ASP and ended up with the same result.
May be It was the first time I was using such a trick on this particular type of string. :)

Thanks!