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.NET Questions (CLOSED)

Hey guys,

I have to save some application-wide regular expressions. I'm not able to save these string values in the Web.config appsettings because the regex values have special characters (like double-quotes), which make it difficult to save them as XML strings.

Is there a way to work-around this, or maybe store the regex values elsewhere, so that they are available application-wide and can be edited easily without compiling the code.

Any thoughts?

It seems a bit strange that you'd want a regular expression to change often enough that you'd want it in a config file.

Your best bet is probably to store them in a database, and expose them for edit through an admin interface.

It should be possible to encode them, before storing them in web.config.

You could encode it.... but you can avoid the issue by putting these "configurable regular expressions" in a plain old text file (eg old school ini files).  You can cache the expressions and update the cache via a cache dependency on that file.

These are the characters you have to escape in your regex:

& = &
< = &lt;
> = &gt;
" = &quot;
' = &apos;

Unfortunately, you can't use CDATA in an attribute in your appSettings section.

Thanks guys! Encoded values work just fine.