Question

How I love regex!

I have a string which will be a mangled form of XML, like:

<Category>DIR</Category><Location>DL123A</Location><Reason>Because</Reason><Qty>42</Qty><Description>Some Desc</Description><IPAddress>127.0.0.1</IPAddress>

Everything will all be on one line, however the ‘headers’ will often be different.

So what I need to do is extract all information from the string above, putting it into a Dictionary/Hashtable

—

string myString = @"<Category>DIR</Category><Location>DL123A</Location><Reason>Because</Reason><Qty>42</Qty><Description>Some Desc</Description><IPAddress>127.0.0.1</IPAddress>";

//this will extract the name of the label in the header
Regex r = new Regex(@"(?<header><[A-Za-z]+>?)");

//Create a collection of matches
MatchCollection mc = r.Matches(myString);

foreach (Match m in mc)
{
    headers.Add(m.Groups["header"].Value);
}


//this will try and get the values.
r = new Regex(@"(?'val'>[A-Za-z0-9\s]*</?)");

mc = r.Matches(myString);

foreach (Match m in mc)
{
    string match = m.Groups["val"].Value;
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(match) || match == "><" || match == "> <")
        continue;
    else
        values.Add(match);
}

—
I hacked that together from previous work with regexes to the closest I could.
But it doesnt really work the way I want it.

the ‘header’ also pulls the angle brackets in.

The ‘value’ pulls in a lot of empties (hence the dodgy if statement in the loop). It also doesnt work on strings with periods, commas, spaces, etc.

It would also be much better if I could combine the two statements so I dont have to loop through the regex twice.

Can anyone give me some info where I can improve it?

Answer 1

If it looks like XML, why not use the XML parser functionalities of .net? All you need to do is to add a root element around it:

string myString = @"<Category>DIR</Category><Location>DL123A</Location><Reason>Because</Reason><Qty>42</Qty><Description>Some Desc</Description><IPAddress>127.0.0.1</IPAddress>";

var values = new Dictionary<string, string>();
var xml = XDocument.Parse("<root>" + myString + "</root>");
foreach(var e in xml.Root.Elements()) {
    values.Add(e.Name.ToString(), e.Value);
}