I need to clean up some xml another parser missed

The symbol I need to get rid of is & (except when it's correctly used in a escape sequence of course). So I wan开发者_C百科t to find all the "Mr. & Mrs. Jones" and replrace them with "Mr. & Mrs". So I'm looing for all instances of " &", or "& ". And I need to replace them with &

Sure sounds like a job for RegEx; which I SUCK AT! But I envy it if that helps.

Any Thanksgiving Answeres out there for me?

Try this:

Regex.Replace(input, @"&(?!\w+;|#\d+;|#x[0-9a-fA-F]+;)", "&");

This will replace any orphan & for correct escaped sequence.

Use HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(your string)?

If you're doing plain old string operations, the simplest (albeit probably not the most efficient) way to accomplish this is to just use two replaces:

string xml = "Mr. & Mrs. Jones  ";
xml = xml.Replace("&", " ");
xml = xml.Replace("  ", " ");

You could probably use a StringBuilder and build a quick loop that looks for all the "&" which would work pretty well as well...

Regex would work great too, but I always forget post conditions...

**Edit: Forgot about other escape sequences, so this solution is incomplete at best **