🖥️How to use

How do you use this library?

This library provides two essential tools:

• Analyzing a string, a file, or a stream for abnormal spaces

• Converting occurrences of abnormal spaces to normal ones

Analysis

The analysis tools are found under the SpaceAnalysisTools class to provide you with the analysis results about abnormal spaces, like non-breaking spaces in the middle of the text, or zero-width spaces in the URLs for malicious intentions, such as phishing.

This class currently provides the following tools:

public static SpaceAnalysisResult AnalyzeSpaces(string text)
public static SpaceAnalysisResult AnalyzeSpacesFrom(string pathToFile)
public static SpaceAnalysisResult AnalyzeSpacesFrom(Stream stream)

It supports analyzing the spaces either from the provided string, the path to a file containing abnormal spaces, or the stream that holds the data containing such spaces. When analysis is complete, SpaceAnalysisResult provides the following values:

• ResultingStream

  • This provides a stream resulting from the analysis functions.

• FalseSpaces

  • This provides an array of tuples containing a false space character as the first item and the character name as the second item.

The stream that you're going to use should be readable and seekable, or SpaceMan will complain about it by throwing an exception to the caller.

Conversion

The other part of SpaceMan is conversion, which lets you convert all the abnormal spaces found to normal spaces. SpaceConversionTools plays a role in this area, which makes it an important part of the library.

The class currently provides the following tools:

public static byte[] ConvertSpaces(SpaceAnalysisResult analysisResult)
public static string ConvertSpacesToString(SpaceAnalysisResult analysisResult)
public static void ConvertSpacesTo(SpaceAnalysisResult analysisResult, string pathToFile)
public static void ConvertSpacesTo(SpaceAnalysisResult analysisResult, Stream stream)

It requires running one of the analysis functions found at the top of this page. ConvertSpaces() returns an array of resulting bytes for further operation, like sending an array of bytes to a serial device. Alternatively, ConvertSpacesToString() offers to give you a result as a string.

ConvertSpacesTo() provides you with two versions of this function; the one that writes to a file, and another that writes to a stream.

The resulting stream that ConvertSpacesTo() writes to must be writable, or SpaceMan will complain about it by throwing an exception to the caller.