I'm using reflection to access and store properties and fields. However, to avoid having redundant data, I want to get rid of auto-implemented properties' backing fields, which are also enumerated as normal fields. Looks like these backing fields are named as "{PropertyName}k_BackingField", and it would seem that I could make do with just parsing this string, but I wonder if there's a better approach than relying on an internal, compiler-provided mangled name.
Thanks.
Well, you can check whether it's a valid C# identifier. If it isn't, that's a pretty good indicator that it's an automatic property. Indeed, if you know that it will have been compiled by a particular version of a particular compiler, you could rely on the naming pattern. Sounds a bit fragile though.
More robustly, if you just want to know whether it's compiler-generated, check whether the FieldInfo has the CompilerGeneratedAttribute applied to it. Now there are other times when the compiler will generated extra fields for you - such as for caching delegates created with lambda expressions which don't need any extra context - but it at least shows that it's not a field explicitly declared by the developer (unless they've also explicitly applied the attribute, of course).
At least for my classes the compiler annotates those automatic property backing fields with the CompilerGenerated attribute. So you could just check for that, I think.