2 Lines of C# Code that replaced my bloated 44 lines - The Reductionist's View

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Could you reduce my 44 lines down to just 2?

Sometimes as a developer you are humbled by something dumb that you did. I had written this huge, poorly designed piece of code that was supposed to remove blank strings that are in a relatively small array of strings. I felt smart and not smart at the same time. But the end result was good.

All I wanted to do is remove blank strings in an array of strings. That means if I had a string array of 35 with a 31 one of them blank, I just wanted that to be converted to a nice small 4 element string array with my data.

So I wrote this goofy piece of code. It was even named poorly.

Bloated Algorithm
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 public static string[] KillSingleBlanks(string[] arr) {     // if find two blanks, copy one, next char, and skip all     // if found one blank, copy current     //     int max_size = arr.Length;     string[] new_arr = new string[max_size];     int src = 0;     int trg = 0;     int hdr_count = 0;     while (src < max_size && (arr[src].Trim() == "" || arr[src] == null))     {         src++;     }     while (src < max_size)     {         if (arr[src].Trim() == "" && arr[src + 1].Trim() == "")         {             // found 2 in a row, so copy one blank and skip to end             //new_arr[trg++] = "";             while (src < max_size && arr[src].Trim() == "")             {                 src++;             }             break;         }         else         {             // here because no two blanks in a row, so copy and advance             if (arr[src] != "")             {                 new_arr[trg++] = arr[src];             }             src++;         }     }     hdr_count = trg;     while (src < max_size)     {         if (arr[src].Trim() != "")         {             new_arr[trg++] = arr[src];         }         src++;     }     return new_arr; }

How I ended up with two lines

Stop. Have you tried to find an answer yourself? Here it is ? two lines of code that do an infinitely better job at removing blank string entries.

The Reductionist's Algorithm
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 public static string[] KillSingleBlanks(string[] arr) {     var array = arr.Where(r=>!String.IsNullOrEmpty(r.Trim()));     string[] str = array.ToArray<string>();     return str; }

Follow up

Now I need to go for manual loops in arrays and then try to work with them as IEnumerables and collections that are processed with LINQ.