Convert two ascii characters to their 'corresponding' one character extended ascii representation

Question

The problem: I have two fixed width strings from an external system. The first contains the base characters (like a-z), the second (MAY) contain diacritics to be appended to the first string to create the actual characters.

string asciibase = "Dutch has funny chars: a,e,u";
string diacrits  = "                       ' \" \"";

//no clue what to do

string result = "Dutch has funny chars: á,ë,ü";

I could write a massive search and replace for all characters + different diacritics but was hoping for something a bit more elegant.

Somebody have a clue how to fix this one? Tried it with calculating the decimal values, using string.Normalize (c#) but no results. Also Google didn't really turn up with something.

Answer 1

I cannot find an easy solution except using lookup tables:

public void TestMethod1()
{
    string asciibase = "Dutch has funny chars: a,e,u";
    string diacrits = "                       ' \" \"";
    var merged = DiacritMerger.Merge(asciibase, diacrits);
}

[EDIT: Simplified code after suggestions in the answers from @JonB and @Oliver]

public class DiacritMerger
{
    static readonly Dictionary<char, char> _lookup = new Dictionary<char, char>
                         {
                             {'\'', '\u0301'},
                             {'"', '\u0308'}
                         };

    public static string Merge(string asciiBase, string diacrits)
    {
        var combined = asciiBase.Zip(diacrits, (ascii, diacrit) => DiacritVersion(diacrit, ascii));
        return new string(combined.ToArray());
    }

    private static char DiacritVersion(char diacrit, char character)
    {
        char combine;
        return _lookup.TryGetValue(diacrit, out combine) ? new string(new [] {character, combine}).Normalize()[0] : character;
    }
}