Question

First of all, i’m using the function below to read data from a pdf file.

public string ReadPdfFile(string fileName)
    {
        StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

        if (File.Exists(fileName))
        {
            PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(fileName);

            for (int page = 1; page <= pdfReader.NumberOfPages; page++)
            {
                ITextExtractionStrategy strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
                string currentText = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(pdfReader, page, strategy);

                currentText = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ASCIIEncoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Default.GetBytes(currentText)));
                text.Append(currentText);
                pdfReader.Close();
            }
        }
        return text.ToString();
    }

As you can see , all data is saved in a string. The string looks like this:

label1: data1;
label2: data2;
label3: data3;
.............
labeln: datan;

My question: How can i get the data from string based on labels ?
I’ve tried this , but i’m getting stuck:

   if ( string.Contains("label1")) 
   {
       extracted_data1 = string.Substring(string.IndexOf(':') , string.IndexOf(';') - string.IndexOf(':') - 1);
   }
   if ( string.Contains("label2"))
   {
       extracted_data2 = string.Substring(string.IndexOf("label2") + string.IndexOf(':') , string.IndexOf(';') - string.IndexOf(':') - 1); 
   } 

Answer 1

Have a look at the String.Split() function, it tokenises a string based on an array of characters supplied.

e.g.

 string[] lines = text.Split(new[] {';'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

now loop through that array and split each one again

foreach(string line in lines) {
      string[] pair = line.Split(new[] {':'});
      string key = pair[0].Trim();
      string val = pair[1].Trim();
      ....
   }

Obviously check for empty lines, and use .Trim() where needed…

[EDIT]
Or alternatively as a nice Linq statement…

var result = from line in text.Split(new[] {';'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
             let  tokens = line.Split(new[] {':'})
             select tokens;

Dictionary<string, string> = 
       result.ToDictionary (key => key[0].Trim(), value => value[1].Trim());