c# - How do I (elegantly) transpose textbox over label at specific part of string?

Question

I'll be feeding a number of strings into labels on a Windows Form (I don't use these a lot). The strings will be similar to the following:

"The quick brown fox j___ed over the l__y hound"

I want to display the string in a label but overlay a TextBox exactly where the missing letters are.

There'll be 300+ strings, and I'm looking for the simplest, most elegant way to do it.

How do I reposition the textbox accurately for each string?

EDIT: A MaskTextBox won't work as I need multiline support.

Answer 1

One option is to use a Masked Textbox.

In your example, you would set the mask to:

"The quick brown fox jLLLed over the lazy hound"

Which would appear as:

"The quick brown fox j___ed over the lazy hound"

And only allow 3 characters (a-z & A-Z) to be entered into the gap. And the mask could be easily changed via code.

EDIT: For convenience...

Here is a list and description of masking characters

(taken from http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/uploadfile/mahesh/maskedtextbox-in-C-Sharp/).

0 - Digit, required. Value between 0 and 9.
9 - Digit or space, optional.
# - Digit or space, optional. If this position is blank in the mask, it will be rendered as a space in the Text property.
L - Letter, required. Restricts input to the ASCII letters a-z and A-Z.
? - Letter, optional. Restricts input to the ASCII letters a-z and A-Z.
& - Character, required.
C - Character, optional. Any non-control character.
A - Alphanumeric, required.
a - Alphanumeric, optional.
.  - Decimal placeholder.
, - Thousands placeholder.
: - Time separator.
/ - Date separator.
$ - Currency symbol.
< - Shift down. Converts all characters that follow to lowercase.
> - Shift up. Converts all characters that follow to uppercase.
| - Disable a previous shift up or shift down.
 - Escape. Escapes a mask character, turning it into a literal. "" is the escape sequence for a backslash.

All other characters - Literals. All non-mask elements will appear as themselves within MaskedTextBox. Literals always occupy a static position in the mask at run time, and cannot be moved or deleted by the user.