Is there a way of making strings file-path safe in c#?

Ugh, I hate it when people try to guess at which characters are valid. Besides being completely non-portable (always thinking about Mono), both of the earlier comments missed more 25 invalid characters.

foreach (var c in Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()) 
{ 
  fileName = fileName.Replace(c, '-'); 
}

Or in VB:

'Clean just a filename
Dim filename As String = "salmnas dlajhdla kjha;dmas'lkasn"
For Each c In IO.Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars
    filename = filename.Replace(c, "")
Next

'See also IO.Path.GetInvalidPathChars

I agree with Grauenwolf and would highly recommend the Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()

Here's my C# contribution:

string file = @"38?/.\}[+=n a882 a.a*/|n^%$ ad#(-))";
Array.ForEach(Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars(), 
      c => file = file.Replace(c.ToString(), String.Empty));

p.s. -- this is more cryptic than it should be -- I was trying to be concise.

If you want to quickly strip out all special characters which is sometimes more user readable for file names this works nicely:

string myCrazyName = "q`w^e!r@t#y$u%i^o&p*a(s)d_f-g+h=j{k}l|z:x\"c<v>b?n[m]q\\w;e'r,t.y/u";
string safeName = Regex.Replace(
    myCrazyName,
    "\W",  /*Matches any nonword character. Equivalent to '[^A-Za-z0-9_]'*/
    "",
    RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
// safeName == "qwertyuiopasd_fghjklzxcvbnmqwertyu"

From my older projects, I've found this solution, which has been working perfectly over 2 years. I'm replacing illegal chars with "!", and then check for double !!'s, use your own char.

    public string GetSafeFilename(string filename)
    {
        string res = string.Join("!", filename.Split(Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()));

        while (res.IndexOf("!!") >= 0)
            res = res.Replace("!!", "!");

        return res;
    }

Many anwer suggest to use Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars() which seems like a bad solution to me. I encourage you to use whitelisting instead of blacklisting because hackers will always find a way eventually to bypass it.

Here is an example of code you could use :

    string whitelist = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.";
    foreach (char c in filename)
    {
        if (!whitelist.Contains(c))
        {
            filename = filename.Replace(c, '-');
        }
    }