Question

Here is what I’m trying to accomplish. I have an object coming back from
the database with a string description. This description can be up to 1000
characters long, but we only want to display a short view of this. So I coded
up the following, but I’m having trouble in actually removing the number of
words after the regular expression finds the total count of words. Does anyone
have good way of dispalying the words which are less than the Regex.Matches?

Thanks!

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(myObject.Description))
{
    string original = myObject.Description;
    MatchCollection wordColl = Regex.Matches(original, @"[\S]+");
    if (wordColl.Count < 70) // 70 words?
    {
        uxDescriptionDisplay.Text = 
             string.Format("<p>{0}</p>", myObject.Description);
    }
    else
    {                        
        string shortendText = original.Remove(200); // 200 characters?
        uxDescriptionDisplay.Text = 
              string.Format("<p>{0}</p>", shortendText);
    }
 }

EDIT:

So this is what I got working on my own:

else 
{
    int count = 0;
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
    string[] workingText = original.Split(' ');
    foreach (string word in workingText)
    {
        if (count < 70)
        {
            builder.AppendFormat("{0} ", word);
        }
        count++;
    }
        string shortendText = builder.ToString();
}

It’s not pretty, but it worked. I would call it a pretty naive way of doing this. Thanks for all of the suggestions!

Answer 1

One method, if you’re using at least C#3.0, would be a LINQ like the following. This is provided you’re going strictly by word count, not character count.

if (wordColl.Count > 70)
{
    foreach (var subWord in wordColl.Cast<Match>().Select(r => r.Value).Take(70))
    {
        //Build string here out of subWord
    }
}

I did a test using a simple Console.WriteLine with your Regex and your question body (which is over 70 words, it turns out).