Question

i am developing an application using c#.net in which i need that if a input entered by user contains the character ‘-‘(hyphen) then i want the immediate neighbors of the hyphen(-) to be concatenated for example if a user enters

A-B-C then i want it to be replaced with ABC
AB-CD then i want it to be replaced like BC
ABC-D-E then i want it to be replaced like CDE
AB-CD-K then i want it to be replaced like BC and DK both separated by keyword and

after getting this i have to prepare my query to database.

i hope i made the problem clear but if need more clarification let me know.
Any help will be appreciated much.

Thanks,
Devjosh

Answer 1

Untested, but this should do the trick, or at the very least lead you in the right direction.

private string Prepare(string input)
{
    StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
    char[] chars = input.ToCharArray();
    for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
    {
        if (chars[i] == '-')
        {
            if (i > 0)
            {
                output.Append(chars[i - 1]);
            }
            if (++i < chars.Length)
            {
                output.Append(chars[i])
            }
            else
            {
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    return output.ToString();
}

If you want each pair to form a separate object in an array, try the following code:

private string[] Prepare(string input)
{
    List<string> output = new List<string>();
    char[] chars = input.ToCharArray();
    for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
    {
        if (chars[i] == '-')
        {
            string o = string.Empty;
            if (i > 0)
            {
                o += chars[i - 1];
            }
            if (++i < chars.Length)
            {
                o += chars[i]
            }
            output.Add(o); 
        }
    }
    return output.ToArray();
}