Removing quotes from a string

Arduino:
Removing quotes from a string

How to:

To remove quotes from a string in Arduino, you can loop over the characters and rebuild the string without the quote characters. For example:

String removeQuotes(String str) {
  String result = ""; // Create an empty string to hold the result
  for (int i = 0; i < str.length(); i++) {
    if (str[i] != '"' && str[i] != '\'') { // Check each character
      result += str[i]; // Append to result if not a quote
    }
  }
  return result;
}

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  String testStr = "'Hello, World!'";
  Serial.println(removeQuotes(testStr)); // Should print: Hello, World!
}

void loop() {
  // Nothing to do here
}

Sample output on the Serial Monitor would be:

Hello, World!

Deep Dive

The concept of removing characters from a string isn’t unique to Arduino; it’s common in many programming environments. Historically, string manipulation functions have been a core part of programming languages to allow developers to clean and parse data effectively.

In addition to manually looping and building a new string as shown above, there are alternative methods. For example, one could use the replace() method to substitute quotes with an empty string, though there are trade-offs in terms of readability and managing escape characters.

String removeQuotes(String str) {
  str.replace("\"", ""); // Replaces all double quotes
  str.replace("\'", ""); // Replaces all single quotes
  return str;
}

Understanding the trade-offs is vital. The loop method can be slower for long strings but is explicit and easy to customize (like if you needed to remove only leading and trailing quotes). The replace() method is more concise and generally faster, but it gets trickier if there’s a need to handle escaped quote characters inside the string.

Arduino:Removing quotes from a string

How to:

Deep Dive

See Also

Arduino:
Removing quotes from a string