"Evil".Split()

[Bucky]

In the never-ending quest to ditch the old VB6 way of doing

things, I'm now trying to figure out how to use String.Split like

the old Split$ function.

 

Using Split$, a delimeter could be another String, not only one

character. The String.Split method, however, only wants to take

a Char as a delimeter. I tried converting a string into a Char

array, but that treated each and every Char as a delimeter. Oops.

 

Nothing is wrong with using Split$, and I'm forced into using it for

now, but as I mentioned, the world would be a much better place

if we all got along and used VB.NET's features. :)

 

So how can I use String.Split and pass another String as a delimeter?

[divil]

       Dim x As String = "I, like, cheese"
       Dim y As String() = x.Split(", ".ToCharArray)

 

You'll get "I", "", "like", "", "cheese"

 

Don't really know why is puts blanks in there like it does.

[quwiltw]

Can you post what your trying? I just had a crack at it and it seems to work with one quirk.

 

Dim delimiter As String
       delimiter = "***"

       Dim myString As String
       myString = "hello***world***again***trying"
       Dim strAry As String()

       strAry = myString.Split(delimiter.ToCharArray)

The only problem with what I have is that it splits into 10 elements instead of 4 but this is my first try.

[quwiltw]

Awww Shucks... looks like I've been beaten to the punch... and you got the same extra elements I got.

[Vitaly]

There is one way of doing this, the result is correct, but I don't know if it's a "clean" enough solution:

 

 

Dim sTest1 As String = "Good****morning****afternoon****and night"

Dim y As String() = sTest1.Replace("****", Chr(0)).Split(Chr(0))

[Bucky]

Dim toSplit As String = "The[split]quick brown fox[split]jumped over the[split]lazy dog"

 

toSplit.Split("[split]".ToCharArray()) returns 26 array items, because

each character is counted as a delimeter, and if any one of those

characters is encountered, the string splits there (see below).

 

Should I just stick to Split$??? :)

 

(0): "The"

(1): ""

(2): ""

(3): ""

(4): ""

(5): ""

(6): ""

(7): "qu"

(8): "ck brown fox"

(9): ""

(10): ""

(11): ""

(12): ""

(13): ""

(14): ""

(15): "jum"

(16): "ed over "

(17): "he"

(18): ""

(19): ""

(20): ""

(21): ""

(22): ""

(23): ""

(24): ""

(25): "azy dog"

[Derek Stone]

You could create your own Split function. We can't expect the framework to do it all you know. :)

[Bucky]

I'll consider it, although using Split$ is much more convenient (sp?)

for the moment.

 

Thanks for your ideas, everyone.

 

[edit]Actually, Vitaly, I really like your idea, and I'll probably stick

in a function and use it. :) Thanks.[/edit]

[wyrd]

In Java there's a nice class named StringTokenizer. To be honest, I'm surprised that .NET doesn't have anything similar which is why I bring it up (.NET seems to take a lot of elements from Java in terms of the assemblies available compared to Java packages).

 

I only bring this up incase you were going to build your own Split function. It may give you some ideas. If I knew more about .NET I'd go ahead and do it myself. :-\

 

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.1/docs/api/java/util/StringTokenizer.html

[divil]

Ideally in .NET you'd use Regular Expressions to do this sort of thing. They seem to have focussed the attention more towards these in the framework and examples I have seen. There is a lot of support for them.

[wyrd]

Divil is right about the heavy support for Regular Expressions. I finally got a chance to learn about them (at least enough to start doing basing things). Splitting words using a delim is easy enough using RegEx. I wrote up a quick console application that demonstrates the ease of use.

 

'To shorten code below that uses this assembly.
Imports System.Text.RegularExpressions

Module Module1
   Sub Main()
       'Sentence to split.
       Dim str As String = "Some[*split*]sentence[*split*]to[*split*]split."

       Dim delim As String = "[*split*]"   'Delim to use.
       delim = Regex.Escape(delim)         'Be sure to add escape chars.

       'Split the string using our delim.
       Dim splitStr As String() = Regex.Split(str, delim)
       Console.WriteLine(splitStr.Length)  'Print out the number of words.

       'Print out each word.
       Dim word As String
       For Each word In splitStr
           Console.WriteLine(word)
       Next

       Console.ReadLine()
   End Sub
End Module